Abstract: Energy-saving routing is one of the important topics in Wireless Ad hoc NETworks (WANETs), which is significant for prolonging network lifetime. Under convention routing, the data delivery paths, with each used by a pair of nodes, may intersect at some nodes, which causes these shared nodes to forward packets from multiple intersecting paths, making them expend more energy than other nodes and become invalid quickly due to energy depletion. To overcome the problem of uneven energy consumption among nodes, a Network Coding Based Energy Efficient Routing (NCBEER) is presented in this paper, which is able to capture the opportunity of path intersecting, allows the shared nodes to encode the forwarded packets, and multicasts the coded packets to neighboring nodes so that the number of transmissions and energy expenditure are reduced. In addition, the average number of multicasts for a coding node to guarantee the coded packet to be received by all the receiving nodes is derived; and the delivery cost of a wireless link is defined, which is used by NCBEER to dispatch packets to different paths. Simulation shows that NCBEER is able to reduce and balance energy expenditure of nodes and network lifetime is prolonged.