In a recent article, Albrecht et al. (Energy Policy 30 (2002) 727) presented a new decomposition technique based on the Shapley value and used it to study CO2 emissions in four OECD countries. This technique makes it possible to present decomposition without residuals, a very desirable property in decomposition analysis. We show that their proposed technique and the method by Sun (Energy Economics 20 (1998) 85) are exactly the same. As there has been a great deal of interest in decomposition analysis in energy policy studies, we extend the work by Albrecht et al. (Energy Policy 30 (2002) 727) by giving a more complete and up-to-date overview of perfect decomposition techniques and their role in energy demand and related analysis. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.