In our sawmills here they say that they harvest everything from the tree except the scream of the saws. It’s long been known that turpentine, other hydrocarbons can be gotten from pine needles, tree sap. That word “char” jogged my memory. Find that article in Infinite-Energy.com magazine on the Karrick(sp?)process that he developed long ago. He was working with oil shale I believe but it was simply ignored by the oil industry then, all but forgotten. It’s not exactly syncrude as such, just carbonization w/o oxygen, and much cheaper than syncrude.
But not being an expert like you in this area Thackney, I defer to you to check it out. What I DO know is that all the technical genius ever born isn’t just HERE right now, there were GIANTS in the days of yore as well.
I don’t see this as new either, just a new process of extracting what has been used before.
Wasn’t it Einstein who said: “If I have seen farther into the future, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”.............?