If they can make ethanol, perhaps they can make crude oil, instead.
Otherwise we wind up with a lot of idle refinery capacity and unemployed refinery and oil industry workers.
Plus we wouldn’t need to modify our vehicles. And finally we could flood the world with our synthetic crude oil, drive the price down, and harm our mortal mideast enemies.
Even such things as how the microbes in the guts of termites turn otherwise indigestible cellulose into energy for these bugs, is virtually unknown at present. This project sounds like a (pardon the specific religious reference) hail Mary pass. Being able to reproduce on large scale what happens in termite guts is likely going to take much studied research.