Alkanes to alcohols and back?
That's not viable at all.


There's no good reaction to go from alkanes to alcohols. This would be incredible expensive to do, produces a lot of waste and is potentially very dangerous too.
There's no good reaction to convert alcohols back to alkanes. It would be again very expensive. And you would convert more expensive products into less expensive ones, which isn't a very good thing to do.
We know how to handle liquefied petroleum gas very well, it's not that dangerous. There are also hundreds of thousands of km of such pipelines [1] already in use. The safety aspect definitely doesn't justify the cost, danger, waste, ressources and energy needed to convert the product forth and back again.


[1] http://www.j-pipe-eng.com/abstract.cfm?cat_no=2145s