3 ms·

A lot of that corn goes into ethanol instead.

• I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  Roughly 1/3rd of the US corn production is for ethanol[1], 1/3rd for animal feed, and 1/3rd for human food products. Ethanol kind of sucks as a fuel though, because it can't be piped for various reasons[2] including water-induced separation in gasoline-ethanol blends and oxygen induced steel corrosion requiring specialized pipeline construction to mitigate. This means ethanol is usually shipped via train and worse, trucked, increasing diesel usage/emissions on top of the farm equipment emissions to grow and harvest the corn in the first place. So in the end it isn't much better than pure gasoline at best, and is actually overall higher total emissions at worst. Edit: ethanol also doesn't have the same range as gasoline per tank, so vehicles may need to fuel up more often, making the problem worse. 1. https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/07/29/corn-americas-largest-crop-2019 https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/07/29/corn-americas-lar... 2. https://www.ogj.com/refining-processing/article/17217746/ethanol-pipelines https://www.ogj.com/refining-processing/article/17217746/eth...