No the did not invent wood they make syngas the very same stuff the German’s used in WW2 to make diesel and jet fuel on a massive industrial scale. The reaction is named after the two Germans who invented it Fischer - Tropsch which the South Africans use every day to make literately millions of gallons of synthetic diesel.
Syngas is the base material for a number of very valuable and important industrial chemical synthesize reactioins done at refineries world wide in megagram quantities everyday. The break through would be having a process that does not use precious metal catalysts to generate usable quantities of syngas for the direct synthesis of diesel, jet fuel or petrol. The Fischer - Tropsch process doesn’t care if that syngas came for coal, biomass, this solar process it only cares what the H2/CO ratio is which determines if you get heavy paraffin wax, or light alkeanes. If they have a way to take atmopheric CO2 and water plus sunlight and make syngas cheaply it would change the world.
The chemistry to make synthetic fuels via Fischer - Tropsch syngas is well established and commercialized on a global scale. The Chinese use coal, the south Africans also use coal, there is a plant going up in Louisiana that will use shale gas, Qatar uses methane.