Yuxin Yan

China's petroleum import dependency has remained above 70% for many years, and this trend is projected to continue in the coming years. Therefore, advancing coal-to-oil technologies has become a national key priority for safeguarding national energy security, ensuring a reliable supply of oil and related hydrocarbon products until renewable energy becomes dominant and sustainable. Coal-to-oil processes consist of direct routes and indirect routes via coal gasification. Since the beginning of this century, extensive research and development have been conducted on both routes, with significant advancements achieved. This paper focuses exclusively on the direct routes, mainly coal pyrolysis and direct coal liquefaction. As a large portion of these advancements have been published in Chinese-language media, which are not accessible to the English-language academic community, this paper emphasizes the findings reported in Chinese journals since the start of this century and highlights several critical challenges that remain to be addressed.