Oil shale is one of the most promising replacements for traditional energy resources. Its total reserves are enormous, and, moreover, they are widespread. This makes shale oil insensitive to problems of individual suppliers. A lot of countries, which lack traditional energy sources for their development, are conducting investigations in the field of an increase of the effectiveness of oil shale as a substitute for oil and gas. These studies are mostly concerned with processing of oil shale. At this, economic and ecological effects could also be reached upon extraction. This paper deals with experimental studies on cutting oil shale by high-pressure water jets. The outcome was establishing a generalized equation for calculating the efficiency of oil shale cutting by high-pressure water jets and equations for estimating rational values of hydraulic parameters such as water pressure and diameter of the nozzle orifice as well as rational value of the traverse speed.