I believed the methanol manufacturing stuff until I was researching something unrelated and unraveled it. I guess GDW heard "wood alcohol" and took it literally.
Your group of 100,000 should be able to make
ethanol from wood. I just wont be as easy as the book has methanol being produced. If you can manufacture sulfuric acid for pre-processing the wood, you should be able to do it. Or you can say someone genetically engineered a cellulose processing yeast before or during the early stages of the war (which is something they are working on now).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulosic_ethanol has more information than I can type here.
Unfortunately I do not have realistic production numbers for an improvised manufacturing facilities yet.