Uh, I know sometimes a study is needed to actually bring something to scientific standards, but isn't this sort of thing just obvious? This is what the energy business is all about, creating more output than input.
I'm pretty sure the processing step of the biomass they're using for the modelling in this paper is not exactly the most recent. Sadly, our techno-economic modelling guy is out of the country at the moment, so I can't ask him what he thinks of this model. Still lots of problems to overcome, but I don't think this model captures them well..