Swift's fuel is not at all an alcohol, it is an acetate and smells like your wife's nail polish remover.
It is for real; but has two substantial hurdles. One is that the feedstocks degrade rather quickly, so the process will probably not run year-round (or will be substantially less profitable in the winter months). Thus, the investors either need to support a plant which only operates 1/2 of the year or spend much more on feed stocks in the off months. The other is scalability - as demand goes up, more land must be dedicated to feedstocks rather than food crops, driving costs up both for food and for feed stocks.
If we were simply discussing 100LL, this process would make sense (and is currently the only real advantage I see Swift as having over competing biofuel processes, since none of them produce a product with sufficient octane to replace 100LL). In fact, if plants were built around the world it might actually be cheaper in time than 100LL is now. However, Swift (and their competitors) are all eying the JET-A market. The bio-mass necessary for that scope of production is, IMHO, completely impractical.