Which parts of the economy face the highest cost shock?
An oil shock does not land evenly. The part of the economy that burns the most energy is the part that absorbs the largest bill when prices rise, and in the United States that is transport, followed by industry. Homes and commercial buildings sit lower down, insulated in part by electricity and gas rather than direct oil.
This heatmap sizes each sector by how much energy it consumes and colours it by how that consumption is trending year on year. A large, rising cell is where a higher crude price does the most economic damage, because more energy is being used and the trend is upward rather than flat.
Which parts of the economy face the highest cost shock?
US energy consumption by sector. Cell size = consumption volume. Colour = year-on-year change in consumption.
How this is built
Consumption comes from the EIA Monthly Energy Review end-use tables: transport (TEACBUS), industry (TEICBUS), residential (TERCBUS) and commercial (TECCBUS). Cell area is the latest annual total for each sector. Colour is the change from the prior year, so it reads as momentum rather than absolute level.
Two limits are worth stating. Consumption is a proxy for exposure, not a direct cost figure, since each sector’s fuel mix differs and not all of it is oil. And the annual series lags the present, so the chart shows structural weight rather than this month’s bill. It is live rather than static, so no fixed table is shipped with this page.
Sources
EIA Monthly Energy Review, end-use sector consumption tables 2.2 to 2.5 (public domain).