The energy consumption in production process is changing especially in developing countries by substituting technology. Input-output analysis for energy flows has been developing and is one of the best solutions for investigating macroscopic exchanges of both economy and energy. Since each element in the Leontief inverse contains both direct and indirect effects of any change in final demand, to separate those direct and indirect effects, the power series expansion is available. In this work, the changes of embodied energy intensity in Vietnam from 1996 to 2000 were analyzed using the structural decomposition and its power series expansion. By illustrating the change of causal relationship between direct energy consumption and embodied energy consumption, the change of hidden energy flow, which indicates how the changing embodied energy builds up the change of direct energy consumption in every sector, can be seen. In the case study, the rice processing sector, which is one of the important food processing sectors in Vietnam, is focused. By drawing a diagrammatic map for the change of hidden energy flow, it is clarified that in the case of raising embodied energy intensity, cultivation sector and trade and repaired service sector are the main contributors, and, on the contrary, in the case of reducing embodied energy intensity, paper pulp sector is the main contributor. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.