Abstract: Oil sludge is one of the major industrial solid wastes from petroleum production and refining.Pyrolysis of oil sludge is one of most promising alternative to remove the VOCs (volatile organic compounds) and SVOCs (semivolatile organic compounds) from the solid waste and recover the energy in the gaseous and liquid products, with the minimum pollution to the environment.In this paper, oil sludge was pyrolyzed in a 1—2 kg•h^-1 continuous tubular reactor with internal rotating paddles, which can be regarded as a simplified model of commercial rotary kiln pyrolyzer.The experiments were conducted at 550℃ in argon atmosphere, and mass balance and energy balance were obtained with error no more than 10% and 15%, respectively.About 70%(mass) of solid residue, 20%(mass) of condensate, and 10%(mass) of non-condensable gas were produced.Methane, carbon dioxide, ethane and hydrogen were the major components in the low-calorific gas product (carrier gas Ar included)with calorific value around 11 MJ•m^-3.Physico-chemical properties, distillation fractions, elemental contents, hydrocarbon composition were analyzed for the product oil.Diesel fraction was up to 75% and the calorific value was about 43 MJ•kg^-1 and it could be used as fuel oil directly.However, due to the high contents of S, N, O and PAH, the quality of the fraction was not up to diesel specification.The majority of metal elements were fixed in the pyrolytic residues, while Pb, Cr and Ni were found to be enriched in the fly ash from hot filter.The solid residues contained much sand and inorganic ash.It could be reused as construction material.