My original methanol post
I don't want to ruin anyone's game with science
You could say that in the T2k timeline, cellulose (wood) processing yeast or bacterium was developed to make ethanol (not methanol). IIRC there were over 300 collegiate papers on Ecoli producing ethanol from wood published before 1995. A similar number for yeast were also published.
In reality we are just getting to that point now with yeast and 3 different bacterium. If you want to keep the current rules (doubling the fermentation time however) you could say that specially bred yeast or bacterium are available. Since it is a biological it could be reproduced and distributed quickly.
I defiantly do that in my Morrow game but advanced tech is commonplace there. The HMMWV would have needed a tremendously overhaul, most likely an engine swap to run on ethanol as it cannot run on Gasoline. The source books made another error on that fact.
I am going to look for a morrow project post i made on this a while ago. It was removed from rpghost in the great purge.