Abstract: Currently, lots of domestic and overseas oilfields have entered a high water-cut or even super high water-cut development period. Increasing liquid volume of oil wells has gradually become the main measure to stabilize oil production in most oilfields. For the traditional oil and gas gathering process, the amount of produced water increases sharply and thus the difficulty in treatment is also increased, resulting in the low utilization efficiency of the original treatment equipment of oil, gas and water and the significant increase in operation energy consumption. Therefore, the produced water pre-separation technology increasingly receives attention. This paper comparatively analyzes and systematically summarizes the domestic and foreign development and application situation of the produced water pre-separation technology in recent years. It can be seen that the conventional gravity sedimentation separation method is mainly used, and the water pre-separation technology integrating the centrifugal force field and electric field is less used onsite. Additionally, there exist differences in the understanding of the mechanism of emulsion breaking by the electric field of high water-cut produced fluid. Realizing the compactness of treatment equipment by the high-efficiency gravity sedimentation separation and precise demulsification by electric field based on multiple-field synergy is the development direction of water pre-separation technology in future.