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business budgets don’t usually correspond to any one business sector, and also not to an average group
of business products from any particular sector, which is what I-O tables show. Economic sectors are
vast aggregations of different kinds of businesses offering highly varied kinds of products. Business
budgets call for particular products or services. Even when an item seems to correspond to an industry
group that has only one product, say steel beams, or fuel oil, only the recorded technology energy uses
for that sector are included. So for any particular product from any sector, the sector data does not
show most of the resource uses those businesses pay for being used. All but the production technology
costs are scattered over other sectors.
Figure 1. Energy intensity of US Economic sectors for 1963; sector btu/$ revenue as % of
total btu/$ GDP (vert. axis), by sector size as share of US economy (horiz.axis). Largest
sectors have near average intensity. Energy sectors have low intensity for the revenue
earned. High intensity sectors mostly small and varied [ 12].