Throughout the world many projects have been underway to investigate the conversion of renewable biomass into energy and synthetic fuels by thermo chemical methods such as combustion, pyrolysis, gasification and lique faction. While many of these represent prior art used during the early 20th century, the recent decade since the 1970s oil shock has immeasurably increased the knowledge base for such processes. Much of the new knowledge has been gained by persons who were not trained in classical wood chemistry and there have not yet been many attempts to synthesize the knowledge into a corpus...