Abstract: Oil shale is one of the world's most popular unconventional resources. Affected by the oil crisis, the world is searching for alternative resources urgently. Many countries are paying more and more attention on this clean energy's exploration technology not far behind that America may twist the situation that its natural gas comes from imports mostly relying on shale gas revolution. This paper discusses the present situation and progress of oil shale exploration and exploitation: (1) Oil shale is a kind of high-ash and high-organic source rock, its sedimentary environments are divided into three types which are marine facies, lake facies and continental facies and its deposit types contain offshore and inland lake type. (2) The oil shale resources are very abundant in the world especially America, and also China. However, oil shale has lower exploitable reverse than the proved one. (3) Well logging methods include log R method, resistivity method, and density method on the basis of its logging response characteristics such as high nature gamma, high electronic resistivity, high interval transit-time and low density. (4) Seismic methods include sweetness prediction method and rock physics model method. (5) When evaluating oil shale, it is evaluating oil content mainly and methods which can be used include cracking process, logging evaluation and pyrolysis method. (6) Shale oil production is the difficulty of oil shale exploration and development; it can be divided into four types: strip mining with retorting processing, underground mining with retorting processing, the modified in-situ mining and in-situ thermal conversion processing technology. The results of this paper are good references for understanding the characteristics, development, key technologies and further promotion of oil shale.