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This article is about some research being done at MIT to see how it might be possible to use microbes lining cow intestines to break down cellulose and lignin into sugar and make fuel from that. Such compounds are found in grass and wood chips, consequently MIT also looked into termites but they proved to be too small to generate any significant data.

This research sounds amazing but I couldn't help but looking at the poor cow. Part of what sustainability is about is helping the environment and that includes animals. Even though this would be awesome for the atmosphere, they require a lot of enzymes for this fuel to work. This means more cows I believe, correct me if I'm wrong.

Well yea, poor cows, but we would have to think that there are tons of cow guts that I'm sure that is just thrown away. It sounds gross but might as well use what is being thrown away. One thing that came to my mind was that in the long run if Chinquapin decides to also have hows that we would eat, what better than use the guts from them. It won't be much but I'm sure that we could also contact the slaughter house (and I'm pretty sure they kill a good number of cows per day).

This is more research. At UC Berkley, they found a way to engineer bacteria that make fuel such as diesel by themselves. Though the research is still going on to make it more productive.

This sounds very interesting but how large scale do you think it could become?