Is the corn variety grown to make ethanol the same as that used for any other use; animal feed, cornflakes, corn oil, and corn on the cob?
Fuel corn is the same as feed corn, I believe.
Burn the corn, you gotta feed the cows somehow. It's one of the reasons our grocery bills keep climbing.
About 99% of the corn grown in the U.S. is field corn. The other 1% is sweet corn used for corn on the cob and canned corn in the grocery stores. Corn flakes, corn meal and corn flour are, I believe, made mostly from field corn.
But most field corn is used as a livestock feed, so as the price of field corn goes up, the price of chickens, beef, and pork goes up. The one argument the ethanol people have is that after the ethanol is refined from the corn, the byproduct, called distiller’s grain, can be fed to animals as a food stock.
The dirty secret of ethanol is that it cuts mileage, so we’re getting little fuel value from it. If you use a gallon of pure gasoline and get 40 miles per gallon, and then use 90% of a gallon of pure gas and add 10% ethanol, and cut your mileage by 10% to 36 miles per gallon, you’d have gotten that same 36 mpg by just buying 9/10 of a gallon of gas and skipping the ethanol entirely.
The main justification for the ethanol mandate was to clean up emissions. MTBE was used before ethanol, but it was a severe pollutant of well water and isn’t used anymore. However, today’s engines have become so efficient that (I’ve read...not sure of this) that 95% of the emission-cleaning process is now being done by the engine itself, and that ethanol is only accomplishing 5% of what it did when the mandate was first imposed. (I’ve also heard that if you run a diesel truck with a modern engine through downtown Chicago, the air coming out of the exhaust pipe is cleaner than the air going into the engine intake. In other words, the truck could be cleaning the Chicago air. Don’t know if that’s true though.)
Note: Both of my assertions (mileage is cut so much that ethanol adds little value as a fuel, and engines are now much more efficient so ethanol adds little additional value for emission control) might be incorrect, so don’t treat them as factual. Both might be well be true, however.
If both are true, removal of the mandate would see ethanol production drop precipitously because car manufacturers would be producing cars that met emission standards using just regular gas, plus it would make no sense to add ethanol if it reduced the fuel value of the gasoline.