When natural gas is so cheap it makes sense to start with it but you don't need to start with methane. You can gassify wood chips or switch grass. You cook the biomass with limited oxygen to produce CO and H2 then go from there. You can use CO2 from the air and the excess hydrogen is used to power the process and/or to increase methanol yield.
How is Methanol Made? - Methanol Institute
(yes, they are lobbyists but the chemistry is correct)
Methanol makes much more sense as a fuel than ethanol which has barely break-even net energy content or even negative. Note that methanol production is not distillation. That is ethanol, made using yeast (or the holy grail catalysts to break down cellulose) and corn just like drinking alcohol (which it is). My point about E85 is that they want to make fuel poisonous so that people don't get drunk at the pump instead of at a bar. So they add gasoline and viola. Methanol just does a better job of it. Just be careful around fuel (duh).
The cure for methanol poisoning is to drink ethanol. A professor I took a class from who ran hydrogen and methanol cars once got methanol poisoning while siphoning and called posion control. They told him they could pump his stomach or he could drink a fifth of whiskey. He chose the latter and was fit enough the next day to drive.
