This paper looks at the use of benchmarking approaches for evaluating industrial energy use.  Benchmarks have been used for comparing industrial facilities or entire sectors, or for making temporal comparisons.  We outline a ‘process-step approach’ to benchmarking energy-intensive industries, which accounts for the process differences between industrial facilities or sectors.  We then illustrate the approach using the cement and the iron and steel industries, and construct an example using data from the Brazilian iron and steel industry.