With the advent of modern drilling technology namely sand-tar, hydraulic fracturing and enhanced oil recovery, the amount of waste water to be treated before reuse and/or discharge to the environment has increased manifold in recent time. The treatment of produced water and refinery waste water from the oil industry has been traditionally done by physical as well as chemical processes. The use of membrane technology for the produced and refinery waste water treatment has been recent phenomenon and active research has been focused to enhance the efficiency and life time of the membrane during the operation of the waste water treatment. In this review we briefly focus on the produced and refinery waste water treatment by primary and secondary treatment in historical perspective followed by focusing on various membrane technologies starting from microfiltration (MF), ultrafiltration (UF), nanofiltration (NF) and reverse osmosis (RO). Finally we also focus on the membrane distillation (MD) in combination with forward osmosis (FO) as potential future technology. (C) 2016 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.