Thanks for the information and the links. I was surprised to see it came from a government agency.
Yeah, that is interesting. But from the home page it looks like they are pushing cellulosic ethanol which, according to David Pimentel, is worse than corn ethanol.
But I think doing energy balance studies is not the way to go. It should be based on cost, not energy in versus energy out. If the cost of the energy input is zero, then it doesn't matter what the balance is. Likewise, if the cost of the process is high, say because of huge labor cost or high tech maintenance for example, then it doesn't matter if you have a good energy ratio.