Abstract: Biorefinery is an excellent strategy to deal with the energy crisis and environmental pollution in the new age. Based on biorefinery, low-value biomass resources can be converted into various value-added products. Furfural is one value-added platform chemical from biomass resources, which has important applications in energy, medicine, chemical, and other fields. The industrial production of furfural has come out for nearly one century and is relatively mature nowadays. However, there are still some issues remain to be solved in the industrial production. In order to solve these problems, efforts have been paid on exploring new technologies and progresses. In this paper, the characteristics of furfural were introduced firstly, and the present situation and problems of furfural industrial production technology are summarized, including corrosion of equipment caused by acid catalysts, difficulty in catalyst recycling, water pollution and so on. Then, the research status and problems of furfural preparation by hydrolysis and pyrolysis and the characteristic of the microwave-assisted technology were carefully reviewed. Finally, the future development direction of furfural preparation technology was prospected.