Abstract: As the rapid development of national economy, the increasing attention is paid to the development of unconventional petroleum resources, such as heavy oil, extra-heavy oil, shale oil, bitumen and oil sand. The proportion of unconventional petroleum resources in refinery increases year by year. Thus, how to convert the inferior heavy oil resources into clean fuels conforming to international standards efficiently and reasonably has become a major technical problem. In this paper, a variety of heavy oil fluidization thermal conversion upgrading process reported in the literature were introduced, such as fluid coking, ART, HCC, flexible coking, dual gasification flexible coking, inferior heavy oil double-tube fast pyrolysis-coke gasification coupling process, and so on. The merits and demerits of the fluidization thermal conversion upgrading processes were also analyzed, and the noteworthy research contents about the future development of the processes were also discussed.