Energy conservation is a critical issue in battery powered mobile nodes of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Most MANETs routing protocols use some form of flooding to discover routes among mobile nodes. Despite various optimizations, many route discovery messages are still propagated without considering a coalesce effect of node density and residual energy. During route discovery process, each node of MANET should not blindly broadcast because malfunction of node or link might occur and allows establishing a new path from source to destination which creates extra energy consumption of nodes, sparse network density and a more likelihood occurrence of network partition. In this paper we are developing and evaluating an energy aware routing protocol called a gossip based balanced battery usage routing protocol (GBBU) which integrates minimum residual energy and node degree as cost metric to minimize and distribute energy consumption of MANETs based on Ad hoc on demand distance vector (AODV). The performance of the protocol is measured based on reachability, energy consumed per packet delivered, delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay, and network lifetime using network simulator-2.35. The simulation results show that GBBU routing protocol minimizes energy consumption per packet and fairly distribute energy usage across mobile nodes.