Abstract: The direct coal liquefaction technology, as one of the important routes to substitute oil, has attracted people’s attention and concern for a long time. Combining the practice of the world first direct coal liquefaction demonstration project, the paper describes the different developing courses and the latest progress of direct coal liquefaction technologies and elaborates the development process of new coal liquefaction technologies, technical characteristics, experimental work and research of core technologies. The paper also points out the orientation of future research and development of direct coal liquefaction technologies in the aspects of graded conversion based on coal characteristics, scaling up of reactor, process optimization, main product and by-product mix optimization, etc.