Or is it not worth it since rice is simply best used as a food source?
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Could it be? Yes. Would it be a good idea? No.
The only part of a plant we can easily make ethanol out of is sugars. To a limited extent we can break down the starches to sugars (starch is just a buncha sugars stuck together chemically) but this takes more energy. The protein is essentially entirely a waste. So the seed coat of the rice is worthless and we have to toss it aside. Then we have to heat and convert all they starchy rice into sugar and/or use a lot of things called enzymes like amylase that can do the same process without a lot of heat but are themselves a little tricky to produce in large quantities and only then can we artificially ferment to get ethanol.
Corn and sugar on the other hand already have a large amount of sugar in them. We can essentially just mash these up and just a little bit of enzymes to free up all the sugar to directly convert into ethanol.
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