Pilot U.S. Physical and Monetary Energy Flow Accounts
Energy is a critical input for all economic activity. Understanding how energy, in its many forms, flows through and supports the economy is important for good decision-making by both public and private stakeholders. Natural resource accounting offers a framework for connecting economic activities to underlying physical processes—such as energy use—and summarizing large amounts of data into useful statistics.
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A recent working paper by U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) researchers Matthew Chambers, Tina Highfill, and Dirk van Duym introduces pilot physical and monetary energy flow accounts (PEFA and MEFA, respectively) for the United States along with a pilot supply-side state-level MEFA. These pilot accounts demonstrate how existing data can be used to develop thematic and extended accounts that integrate economic data with data on the natural resources that support the economy.
The PEFA is based on energy production and consumption data from the Energy Information Administration. Supplementary data from various sources including BEA and the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics are used to link these flows of energy to the economic activities they support. The PEFA is nearly complete in its coverage, but remaining gaps include accounting for cross-border trucking and separating electric from internal combustion cars.
The MEFA complements the PEFA by expressing energy flows in monetary terms. Detailed unpublished data from BEA’s supply and use tables for 2012–2023 decompose industry output for the entire U.S. economy into more than 5,300 distinct product categories. The fine product-level detail of these data provides insight into the internal workings of the U.S. economy by detailing the contribution of specific industries and commodities to gross output and value added. These national-level MEFA tables are well developed, using established thematic account methods and data.
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Finally, the paper presents a state-level supply-side version of the MEFA. While the state-level input-output accounts needed for a complete state-level MEFA are not currently available, the pilot account estimates the domestic supply of energy by state. This pilot appears to be one of the first U.S. pilot natural resource accounts to provide state-level data across all 50 states.
