A worker at Renmatix pumps sugar produced by the company's new supercritical water process into a storage container. Credit: Renmatix.

The key to making biofuels and biochemicals from sources such as wood and grass, rather than food crops, is finding a cheap way to break down hemicellulose and cellulose into sugar that yeast and other organisms can ferment. Once you have the sugars, making ethanol and other chemicals has already been proven on a commercial scale.

A startup called Renmatix, which we wrote about here, is developing a novel process that uses supercritical water to produce the sugars. It claims the process can produce sugar at costs low enough to compete with producing sugar from sugar cane.

The company got a vote of confidence today with a $30 million investment from a division of the large chemical company BASF, which hopes to use the technology to increase its use of renewable raw materials. In addition to the BASF funding, Renmatix raised $20 million from other sources.

A document prepared for the G20 governments by the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and eight other international agencies says that governments should stop subsidies for biofuels, according to reports this week. (The report is here.)

From Reuters:

Governments should scrap policies to support biofuels because they are forcing up global food prices, according to a report by 10 international agencies including the World Bank and World Trade Organization.. . .

"If oil prices are high and a crop's value in the energy market exceeds that in the food market, crops will be diverted to the production of biofuels, which will increase the price of food," said the report.

The report bolsters a movement to stop or reduce ethanol subsidies in the United States and elsewhere. While the ethanol industry disputes the impact of biofuels on food prices, citing economic analyses, other studies have questioned the benefits of biofuels, saying that in addition to driving up food prices, they could increase greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to water shortages.

Here are some details from the report:

During the 2007-2009 period biofuels accounted for a significant share of global use of several crops - 20% for sugar cane, 9% for vegetable oil and coarse grains and 4% for sugar beet. Projections encompass a broad range of possible effects but all suggest that biofuel production will exert considerable upward pressure on prices in the future. For example, according to one study international prices for wheat,coarse grains, oilseeds and vegetable oil could be increased by 8%, 13%, 7% and 35% respectively. Moreover, as long as governments impose mandates (obligations to blend fixed proportions of biofuels with fossil fuels, or binding targets for shares of biofuels in energy use), biofuel production will aggravate the price inelasticity of demand that contributes to volatility in agricultural prices.

GM Volt Ranks 13th Among Green Vehicles

There are 12 cars being sold today that are better for the environment than GM's Volt, a much-touted electric car with a 40-mile electric range and a gas engine for longer trips. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy put the Honda Civic GX, which is powered by natural gas, at the top of its list of the greenest cars of 2011. Not surprisingly, hybrids such as the Toyota Prius and Nissan's electric Leaf also ranked high (the Leaf ranked second). But small, gasoline powered cars, such as the Honda Insight and the Chevrolet Cruze (which costs half as much as the Volt) also did better than the Volt. From the New York Times:

In fact, seven of the vehicles on the list use only gasoline engines.

How can this be? The council uses a novel, holistic method of calculating the slippery notion of greenness, one that expands on the fuel-efficiency and tailpipe-emissions considerations made by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The criteria include emissions from power plants used to charge vehicles and energy used to make the cars.

To Make EVs Affordable, Lease the Battery

Electric vehicles are either very expensive (think Tesla Roadster) or have a short range (think Nissan Leaf, which isn't exactly cheap) because batteries are expensive. It will take years to drive down costs. Meanwhile, a new report suggests that cutting the battery out of the car price tag could make EVs more attractive. From Earth2Tech:

The solution, Accenture suggests, is "disaggregating" battery costs from the car, usually via leasing either the car or the battery itself. Not only would that bring down vehicle costs, but it would help deal with thorny warranty issues, given EV batteries will likely end up having a lifespan of 10 years or less.

Automakers would have to arrange those battery financing terms on their own, or they could partner with a player like Better Place, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup with plans for developing battery swapping stations around the world.

Joule Unlimited Says it Can Make 15,000 Gallons of Fuel on an Acre of Land

A biofuel company has published a paper in which it claims its technology can produce 5 to 50 times more fuel per acre than other biofuels processes. Green Car Congress summarizes:

Joule's process, called Helioculture, combines an engineered cyanobacterial organism supplemented with a product pathway and secretion system to produce and secrete a fungible alkane diesel product continuously in a SolarConverter designed to efficiently and economically collect and convert photonic energy. The process is closed and uses industrial waste CO₂ at concentrations 50-100 times higher than atmospheric.