The energy conservation and exergy loss of a fully thermally coupled distillation commercialized as the divided wall column are compared with those of a conventional two-column system for ternary separation. The used example for the comparison is the benzene-toluene-m-xylene separation process widely used in a petrochemical plant. The design procedure of the fully thermally coupled distillation column is explained, and the energy requirement is compared using the HYSYS. When the same numbers of trays are utilized, the fully thermally coupled distillation column uses 28.2% less energy and 10.4% more exergy loss. The increase of the exergy loss is due to the additional mixing from the bidirectional inter-linking and the temperature elevation in the reboiler from the increased pressure at the bottom of the main column.