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The petrochemical industry evaluation is affected by numerous factors. Many previous studies proposed a use of data envelopment analysis (DEA) as a methodology for energy efficiency analysis in the petrochemical industry. However, excessive decision-making units (DMUs) of DEA model result in difficulties in evaluation and comparison of the different DMUs. In this paper, a new energy analysis framework of petrochemical industrial processes based on DEA integrated interpretative structural model (ISM) is proposed. The ISM method is brought up based on the partial correlation coefficient method to find the main factors and basic reasons that affect the energy consumption of the ethylene production system, which serve as the inputs of the DEA. Meanwhile, ethylene, propylene and C4 productions of the ethylene production system sever as the outputs of the DEA. Then the fractional DEA model is solved by using the linear programming method. The proposed evaluation method can overcome the shortcomings of the DEA model mentioned above, and also is able to reflect the effectiveness of the DMUs and guide the improvement directions of the ineffective DMUs based on slack variables. Our approach is applied in the energy efficiency analysis of Chinese ethylene industry in the petrochemical field. The empirical results show that the proposed energy consumption analysis method is valid and efficient in improvements of energy efficiency in ethylene production systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]