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National Renewable Energy Laboratory 

Innovation for Our Energy Future 

Conference Paper 

NREL/CP-150-41406 

March 2007 

Implementing Systems 

Engineering in the U.S. 

Department of Energy Office 

of the Biomass Program 

Preprint 

C. Riley, R. Wooley, and D. Sandor 

To be presented at the 2007 International Conference on System of 

Systems Engineering: SOSE in Service of Energy and Security 

San Antonio, Texas 

April 16–18, 2007 

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Implementing Systems Engineering in the U.S. 

Department of Energy Office of the Biomass Program 

Cynthia Riley, PE 

National Renewable Energy Laboratory 

1617 Cole Boulevard 

Golden, CO 80401 

cynthia_riley@nrel.gov

Robert Wooley, PhD, PE 

Debra Sandor, PMP 

National Renewable Energy Laboratory 

1617 Cole Boulevard 

Golden, CO 80401 

bob_wooley@nrel.gov

debra_sandor@nrel.gov

Abstract – The DOE Biomass Program is tackling the 

challenge of advancing biomass energy technologies and 

systems from concept to commercial adoption with a goal of 

enabling the production and use of biofuels to help reduce 

future U.S. oil consumption. The complexity of the 

biomass-to-biofuels system of systems and the combined 

dynamics of the existing agriculture, forestry, energy and 

transportation markets within which it operates pose 

challenges for reaching consensus on both a concept of 

operations and preferred strategies for transitioning to a 

significantly larger biofuels industry that is secure, reliable, 

environmentally responsible, and supportive of a thriving 

economy. To ensure that the program is focused on the 

activities critical to achieving its goal, the program is 

implementing systems engineering processes, practices, and 

tools to guide informed decision-making. 

Key Words: Biofuels, biomass, bioenergy, biorefinery, 

cellulosic ethanol, biomass-to-biofuels supply chain, energy 

system dynamics modeling, stage gate management.

1 Background 

The increased reliance on imported petroleum 

sources of energy threatens the U. S. national security, 

economy, and future competitiveness. Biomass is the only 

domestic, sustainable, and renewable primary energy 

resource that can provide liquid transportation fuels. 

Biomass resources include crops such as corn and soybeans, 

agricultural and forest residues such as corn stover (stalks 

and leaves that remain after the corn grain is harvested), 

wheat straw and forest thinnings. Also included are nonedible perennial crops such as switchgrass and poplar, 

which can be grown as energy crops. It is estimated that the 

United States has the potential to produce over 1.3 billion 

tons of biomass annually [1]—more than enough to replace 

about 60 percent of current U.S. gasoline consumption—

sustainably, and without impacting food, feed, and fiber 

uses. 

In his 2006 State of the Union Address, President 

Bush highlighted the role of biomass in reducing the 

nation’s future demand for oil and refined gasoline and 

diesel fuels. The President's near-term goal for biomass is 

“to foster the breakthrough technologies needed to make 

cellulosic ethanol cost-competitive by 2012, enabling 

greater use of this alternative fuel to help reduce future U.S. 

oil consumption”. The President continued to provide 

leadership towards US energy independence in his 2007 

State of the Union Address when he asked Congress and 

America’s scientists, farmers, industry leaders and 

entrepreneurs to join him in pursuing the goal of reducing 

U.S gasoline usage by twenty percent in the next 10 years. 

To support this goal the President proposed increasing the 

supply of renewable and alternative fuels by setting a 

mandatory fuels standard to require 35 billion gallons of 

renewable and alternative fuels in 2017. This level is nearly 

five times the 2012 target for biofuels now in law. To 

support this effort the FY07 budget provided for the U.S. 

Department of Energy (DOE) Biomass Program was more 

than doubled to a total of more than $200 million. The 

Program has set a longer term target to enable the 

production of enough biofuels by 2030 to replace 30% of 

current gasoline consumption. 

2 DOE Biomass Program 

The Biomass Program has overall responsibility for 

managing DOE research, development, demonstration and 

deployment (RDD&D) activities relating to the use of 

renewable biomass for fuels, chemicals, and power 

production. The program’s overarching strategic goal is to 

develop biorefinery related technologies to the point that 

they are cost and performance-competitive and are used by 

the nation’s transportation, chemical and power industries to 

meet their market objectives. 

Biomass research has been a cornerstone of DOE’s 

renewable energy RDD&D efforts over the last 25 years. 

Today, the unprecedented national visibility of cellulosic 

ethanol, in particular, and biofuels, in general, as viable 

alternatives to conventional transportation fuels puts the 

Biomass Program under greater pressure to produce 

measurable results than at any other time in its history. The 

monetary requirements for deployment will dwarf what has 

been spent on research, even over the last 25 years. The 

risks are high and the resources are limited. As the program 

moves forward with the deployment of full-scale biofuels 

systems, increasingly larger sums of government money will 

be spent on research and large-scale technology 

 1
 2

demonstrations. The Biomass Program has an obligation to 

make sure the money is spent properly on the right projects 

and that the projects are conducted in the best possible 

manner. 

2.1 Role of Systems Engineering in the 

Biomass Program 

The Biomass Systems Integration Office (SIO) was 

established in 2004 to implement the systems engineering 

processes, practices, and tools that will enable the program 

to meet the challenges of aligning RDD&D efforts with the 

program’s strategic goals and directing funding to the efforts 

that offer the most promise. As the technical arm of the 

Biomass Program management structure, SIO is tasked with 

(1) establishing, validating, and maintaining the integrated 

baseline as biomass technologies and systems are advanced 

from concept to commercial adoption, (2) providing 

consistent results of analyses to support programmatic 

decisions, and (3) verifying that technology and system 

designs meet program requirements. This paper will 

describe aspects of SIO work in these three areas. 

2.2 Biofuels Concept of Operation 

At the highest level the overall biofuels energy 

system can best be described as a system of systems 

arranged according to the five major elements of the 

biomass-to-biofuels supply chain - from the farmer’s field to 

the consumer’s vehicle. Brief functional descriptions and 

the required 2030 annual capacities of these systems are 

provided in Table 1. 

Because of the wide diversity of biomass feedstocks, 

conversion technologies, and potential products, technical 

elements can be combined in a multitude of bi-refinery 

configurations. The capture this complexity the program has 

created a second tier to the biofuels concept of operations 

defined by seven primary biorefinery pathways, described in 

Table 2. These pathways guide RDD&D efforts and help to 

identify key interfaces that will enable the establishment of 

commercially viable integrated biorefineries. The pathways 

are: corn wet mills, corn dry grind mills, natural oil 

processing mills, agricultural residue processing, energy 

crop processing, forest products mills, and forest residue 

processing. These technology pathways are linked to the 

U.S. biomass resource base, existing segments of today’s 

biomass industry when possible, and future biomass 

industry market segments where envisioned. Each pathway 

represents a generic set of potential biorefinery 

configurations for a specific biomass resource base. Within 

each pathway there are multiple viable alternative routes to 

biofuels production. This pathway framework was designed 

to help: 

• Recognize the diversity of feedstocks and their 

specific associated issues. 

• Strengthen the interfaces between the biomass 

production and conversion elements of the overall 

supply chain. 

Table 1: Major Systems within the Biomass-to-Biofuels 

Supply Chain

Supply 

Chain 

Systems 

Functional Descriptions Annual 

Capacities 

in 2030 

Feedstock 

Production 

Produce large, sustainable 

supplies of regionally 

available biomass 

600 million 

tons 

Feedstock 

Transport 

Implement biomass 

feedstock infrastructure, 

equipment and systems 

including harvesting, 

collection, storage, 

preprocessing, and 

transportation operations 

600 million 

tons and 30 

billion tonmiles of 

transport 

Conversion 

to Fuel 

Deploy cost-effective 

biomass-to-biofuels 

conversion facilities that 

meet all safety and 

environmental standards 

48 billion 

gallons of 

biofuels 

(gge*) 

Fuel 

Transport 

Implement biofuels 

distribution infrastructure 

including storage, blending, 

transportation, and 

dispensing operations 

48 billion 

gallons of 

biofuels 

(gge*) 

Fuel Use Deploy publicly available 

biofuels and biofuelscompatible vehicles with 

same performance as vehicle 

operating on petroleum fuels 

230 million 

biofuel 

compatible 

vehicles 

consuming 48 

billion gallons 

of biofuels 

(gge*) 

gge = gasoline gallon equivalent . A unit of measure used 

to express the energy content of alternative fuels that have 

different energy densities on a common volumetric basis . 

• Identify the complete set of technologies required 

by a biorefinery and the interfaces between the 

individual technology parts, especially those from 

fundamentally different areas. 

• Clarify how new technologies could fit into the 

existing bioindustry market segments. 

• Existing bioindustry market segments understand 

each other and identify current and future 

synergies. 

• Envision the transition from today’s bioindustry to 

the future. 

• Support creation of detailed RDD&D plans and 

progress tracking by giving technical context to 

performance metrics and cost targets, 

The performance and cost targets specified for each of 

the seven resource-based pathways, along with the strategic 

goals and barriers identified in the program’s multiyear 

plan [2] form the basis of the Biomass Program’s technical 

baseline. 
 3

Table 2: Biorefinery Pathways -the Second Level of the 

Biofuels Concept of Operations 

General 

Resource 

Category 

Specific 

Biomass 

Feedstocks 

Biorefinery 

Pathway 

Biofuel 

Product 

Corn Corn Wet 

Mill 

Improvements Starch Corn Corn Dry 

Grind Mill 

Improvements 

Ethanol 

Natural 

Oils 

Soybeans, 

Waste Fats 

and Grease 

Natural Oil 

Processing 

Mill 

Improvements 

Biodiesel 

Corn Stover, 

Cereal Straw, 

Bagasse 

Agricultural 

Residue 

Processing 

Switchgrass, 

Hybrid 

Poplar Trees, 

Willow, 

Energy Cane 

Energy Crop 

Processing 

Pulpwood Forest 

Products Mill 

Improvements 

Lignocellulose 

(plant 

material 

composed 

of 

cellulose, 

lignin and 

hemicellulose) Forest 

thinnings, 

logging 

residues 

Forest 

Residue 

Processing 

Ethanol, 

Other 

Alcohols, 

Renewable 

Diesel, 

Renewable 

Gasoline, 

Other Fuels 

2.3 Biomass Program Integrated Baseline 

The DOE Biomass Program is organized around a 

RDD&D based work breakdown structure (WBS) and the 

biorefinery pathways. This organization is designed to 

integrate the technology advancements from the RDD&D 

efforts into complete biorefinery systems. 

The Biomass Program WBS comprises five 

technology elements described below. The Program uses 

this WBS to manage more than 150 projects conducted at 

universities, national laboratories, and in partnership with 

industry across the country. Detailed information on each 

of these projects forms the programmatic baseline. 

• Feedstock R&D. Development of new sustainable 

agricultural and feedstock infrastructure 

technologies and methods that will be required to 

supply lignocellusic feedstocks to future largescale biorefineries. 

• Biochemical Conversion R&D. Fundamental and 

applied research and technology development for 

producing low-cost sugars from lignocellulosic 

biomass. 

• Thermochemical Conversion R&D. Fundamental 

and applied research and technology development 

for cost-effective, efficient thermochemical 

technologies for producing intermediate products 

(e.g., syngas, pyrolysis oil) from lignocellulosic 

biomass and biomass-derived biorefinery residues. 

• Products R&D. Investigation, evaluation, and 

demonstration of cost-effective fuels—as well as 

co-product, chemical, material, and heat and power 

production from process residues and 

intermediates— to improve overall biorefinery 

plant economics. 

• Integrated Biorefineries Demonstration and 

Deployment. Pilot- and demonstration-scale 

evaluation of cost- and performance-competitive 

integrated biorefinery technologies through public–

private partnerships. Also includes funding for 

pioneer commercial scale biorefineries.

The pathway framework for biorefinery deployment 

provides the management structure and processes for 

integrating advanced technologies being developed by the 

R&D elements to achieve the program mission. The WBSpathway matrix links the WBS project information (scope 

of work, schedule, and cost) with the pathways (system 

configuration, performance, and characteristics) and forms 

the basis of the Biomass Program’s integrated baseline. 

The SIO uses CORE, a computer-assisted systems 

engineering support tool, to organize, coordinate, and 

document the integrated baseline development efforts. It 

captures the complete set of requirements, functions, 

strategies, technologies, inputs, and outputs in a central 

repository. The CORE software provides the Biomass 

Program management with the necessary requirements for 

traceability to establish a defensible basis for budget 

estimates and technical decisions. The software has been 

customized to allow viewing program organization and 

efforts from a variety of perspectives through automatic 

generation of standard reports, tables, and diagrams. Also, 

as shown in Figure 1, custom scripts have been developed to 

import and export data and information through Microsoft 

Office products—Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and 

Microsoft Project—which streamlines the production of 

program-specific periodic standardized reports and 

schedules. This capability is proving to be a key element of 

enabling the diverse set of program participants to share and 

evaluate needs, priorities, plans and progress. As the 

systems engineering management approach continues to 

mature, the more advanced capabilities of the CORE 

software will be implemented. 

Figure 1: CORE Software Use in the Program 
 4

3 Bioindustry Transition Scenario 

Analysis 

The Biomass Program uses a variety of analytical 

methodologies and tools to guide its RDD&D efforts. 

Bioindustry transition analysis is carried out with the 

commercially available dynamic systems model STELLA 

and used to: 

• Identify and evaluate paths by which biomass can 

make a large contribution to meeting future 

demand for energy services, to answer questions 

such as: 

o Which technologies are most likely to be a 

part of the bio-based future? 

o What are the interactions between these 

technologies and other established 

technologies? 

o What are the scenarios for biomass use in 

transportation, power, and chemical 

markets? 

o What market penetration pathways are 

likely? 

• Determine what can be done to accelerate biofuels 

use and in what timeframe associated benefits can 

be realized, by understanding: 

o What external economic factors are most 

important? 

o What are the most likely bottlenecks or 

limiting factors? 

o What are the effects of government policy 

drivers? 

As shown in Figure 2, the model is organized around 

the biomass-to-biofuels supply chain, starting with biomass 

production and collection, through conversion to fuel and 

its eventual distribution and end use. The dynamics of the 

growth of each component in the supply chain are 

determined by the timing of the build-up of the 

infrastructure associated with each step. The build up of 

the infrastructure is determined by the dynamics of investor 

decisions. Investor response is, in turn, driven by the 

performance and cost competitiveness of the fuels and the 

potential demand for them in the marketplace. Finally, 

government policy and external economic factors are 

evaluated as to their impact on the relative attractiveness of 

investing in new biofuels technology. 

An example of a portion of the model output is 

presented in Figure 3 which shows the modeled ethanol 

demand and supply between 2000 and 2030. The four lines 

on the chart show U.S. ethanol demand, total ethanol 

supply, and the breakdown of the total ethanol supply 

between lignocellulose-derived ethanol and corn-derived 

ethanol. According to this particular scenario corn ethanol 

is expected to reach a maximum supply level of about 12 

billion gallons and lignocellulosic ethanol is expected to 

enter the market around 2015 and ramp up to a capacity of 

about 48 billion gallons by 2030. 60 billion gallons of 

ethanol is equivalent to approximately 48 billion gallons of 

gasoline when adjusted for the lower ethanol energy 

density. 

Figure 2: Bioindustry Transition Scenario Model 

Structure 

 . 

Figure 3: Bioindustry Transition Scenario Analysis 

Results 

4 Stage Gate Management 

Stage gate management is a common systems 

engineering based process for making disciplined decisions 

that lead to focused process and product development 

efforts. Focusing the RDD&D efforts of the Biomass 

Program is particularly challenging because of the number 

and diversity of Program participants as well as the broad 

scope in terms of technology as well as stages of 

development. Specifically, the Biomass Program uses 

stage gate management to: 

• Guide decisions on which projects to include in the 

Program's portfolio, 

• Align project objectives with Program objectives, 

• Provide guidance on project definition including 

scope, quality, outputs and integration, and 
 5

• Review projects to evaluate progress and 

continuing fit in the Program portfolio.The basic 

approach is that there is a series of "Gates" to review 

projects and a series of "Stages" to accomplish the work 

necessary to move the project forward. As shown in Figure 

4 [3], there are two paths, or tracks, that a project can take 

depending on the planned outcomes from the project. The 

commercial track is for projects where the outcome is a 

commercial process or product. The research track is for 

more fundamental, pre-competitive scientific projects that 

are critical to developing the technical underpinnings of the 

emerging industry and resolving scientific barriers to 

progress as they are identified. 

Figure 4: Stage Gate Management in the Biomass 

Program 

 The purpose of each gate is two fold. First the project 

must demonstrate that it met the objectives identified in the 

previous stage plan and that it satisfies the criteria for the 

current gate. A set of seven types of criteria have been 

developed against which a project is judged at each gate 

including: 

• Strategic fit, 

• Market/customer 

• Technical feasibility and risks, 

• Competitive advantage 

• Legal and regulatory compliance 

• Critical success factors and showstoppers 

• Plan to proceed 

The second half of the gate review involves the plan to 

proceed. If the decision is made that project "passes" the 

gate, then a plan must be presented in sufficient detail for 

the reviewers to comment on the accomplishments 

necessary for the next stage and goals for completion of the 

next gate. Once the plan is accepted, the project can move to 

the next stage. Since the stakes get higher with each stage, 

the decision process becomes more complex and demanding 

as a project proceeds along this development path. Typically 

projects on the commercial track are public-private 

partnerships which have significant intellectual property 

associated with them. For these projects, detailed gate 

reviews are carried out by DOE and the partner(s) without 

external reviewers to allow confidential discussion of all 

aspects of the project. Projects on the research track have 

generally had gate reviews that included external reviewers 

with meetings open to the public. Gate reviews provide 

critical information that enables key decisions in a number 

of areas, all of which are difficult: project selection and 

prioritization, resource allocation across projects, and 

implementation of the business strategy. 

5 Summary 

The DOE Biomass Program is taking on the challenge of 

advancing biomass technologies and systems from concept 

to commercial adoption. To ensure that the program is 

focused on the activities critical to achieving this goal, the 

program is implementing systems engineering processes, 

practices, and tools to guide informed decision-making. The 

SIO is working with DOE program managers to establish, 

validate, and maintain the integrated baseline based on the 

biomass-to-biofuels supply chain and biorefinery pathways. 

CORE software is used to organize, coordinate, and 

document the integrated baseline in a central repository. A 

systems dynamics model is being developed with STELLA 

software to create and evaluate possible bioindustry 

transition scenarios. The model is organized around the 

biofuels supply chain and includes interactions between 

technology, investment, policy, and the larger energy 

markets. Stage gate management is employed not only as 

critical review process but also to align the RDD&D 

activities of numerous diverse participants and activities 

with the Program’s goals and objectives. 

References 

[1] Robert D. Perlack, et al.,”Biomass as a Feedstock for a 

Bioenergy and Bioproducts Industry: The Technical 

Feasibility of a Billion-Ton Annual Supply”

, USDA/DOE, 

DOE/GO-102005-2135, April 2005 

[2] “Multi-Year Program Plan: 2007-2012. Office of the 

Biomass Program”, Energy Efficiency and Renewable 

Energy, U.S. Department of Energy, August 2005, 

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/pdfs/mypp.pdf, 

downloaded 10/11/06. 

[3] “Stage Gate Management in the Biomass Program”, 

February 2005, http://devafdc.nrel.gov/pdfs/9276.pdf, 

downloaded 10/11/06. 
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This paper describes how the Systems Integration Office is assisting the Department of Energy's Biomass Program 

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