That being said, growing corn for fuel ethanol is stupid.
Other crops are more efficient
(Unless we find a way of turning the whole plant into fuel)
Other crops are more efficient
(Unless we find a way of turning the whole plant into fuel)
The trouble with humans is that they aren't very good at moderation. As soon as they see a little opportunity to do something good they take it to the extreme, to the point that it is no longer good.
Poor yield implies high prices. It is not economical for anything but to leave it idle. And, as you'd expect, when corn was expensive a few years ago many ethanol plants did shut down.
For a short while around 2010, following a massive glut of corn through the early 2000s, the US government was paying ethanol producers to produce when corn was otherwise too expensive to work economically in an effort to jumpstart the industry. But those days are long behind us.
We don’t grow corn specifically to make ethanol, we grow corn because we can eat it if we lose all food imports. I’d much rather eat cornmeal for years than sugar beets.
Turning excess corn into ethanol happens to be better than burying it or throwing it away.