The Brazilian government has started up a large social housing program for low-income families. Considering the large investment for this program, it is important to analyse the environmental impact to create a base for further improvement assessment. The goal of this paper is to visualise the energy use (embodied and operational) during the life cycle of case study for a house in the social housing program. The case study showed that the embodied energy (EE) is 7.2 GJ/m(2) or 30% of the total energy from the life cycle, the operational energy is 17.5 GJ/m(2). Half of the Embodied Energy is due to material use for maintenance and around 57% of the embodied energy is used in the wall construction. Compared to other international studies (5.8 GJ/m(2) per 50 years), the embodied energy is relative high (7.2 GJ/m(2) per 50 years) whereas the operational energy is only the half (17.5 compared to 36 GJ/m(2) per 50 year). The study indicates that the largest improvement potential for reducing the embodied energy is connected to the walls trough choosing materials and systems with less Embodied Energy and higher durability to decrease the need for maintenance and substitution of materials. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.