Methanol not ethanol. One is like is like booze, the other like snooze or go blind.
Methanol is very corrosive - I don’t know how it would do in a car with 10-20 year life, as opposed to a race car that may be torn down every 10 hours of use. It’s also a very nasty poision. The good news is, that it’s amazingly biodegradeable.
It burns almost invisibly, which is fairly dangerous. I’m surprised that the article mentions that methanol attacks Viton, I thought that almost nothing short of hydrofloric acid could.
If you were to design a vehicle engine to run exclusively on methanol or ethanol, the compression ratio could probably be increased to 14:1 or so and/or the timing increased, and this would definitely take a great deal of the sting out of the lower energy density of the fuels.
I think that these fuels have a place in the (possibly near to mid) future, but destroying food (and using quite a bit of petrolueum in fertilizer chemicals) to make it is crazy.
One further comment.
The only thing keeping the price of gasoline high is the restrictions on oil exploration by the government of the Unite States.
The US has more oil reserves on its territory than Saudi Arabia.