Or is it not worth it since rice is simply best used as a food source?
In: 93
If you mean as a fuel source, it’s arguable that corn isn’t worth it either. The corn-to-ethanol pipeline is basically created to prop up the price for farmers. When the full production lifecycle is taken into account, it’s actually worse than gasoline for the climate. [https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2101084119](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2101084119)
Rice would be even worse because of the methane produced in rice production. Rice patties account for 16% of the methane that humans are responsible for.
Edit: Since this blew up, I’ll add a chemist’s perspective. Any system that tries to produce a crop or turn biomass into a fuel is going to be less efficient than the alternative. There is only a fixed amount of chemical energy that a plant can make from the sun. Converting that into a burnable fuel will cost some of that energy. An internal combustion engine is then only 30% efficient. If you have a source of biomass, no matter what it is, the way to get the most vehicle-miles out of it is to burn it (preferable close to the source) in a plant that generates electricity, then use that electricity to charge an EV.
Production of a fuel is a multistep chemical process. For each step to move forward, either the compounds give up energy, or you have to add energy. Better to go from raw material to CO2, water, and ash in one step.
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