"The Water Footprint Concept" as introduced by Hoekstra(2002), indicates the consumption of water needed for the production of the goods and services in a certain period of time consumed by any of the known population (a country, a region or a person). The products and services referred here contain the necessary human food, all kinds of daily necessities, domestic water and environmental water. Green water, Blue water and Gray water are the three components of the water footprint. This can be used to reveal the water consumption in the process of industrial activity and provide scientific basis to manage and regulate water usage in industrial production activities. Coal Oil/CTL, also known as Coal Liquefaction, is short for the coal chemical technology of producing liquid fuels and chemical raw materials based on coal. There are usually two technical routes: Direct Coal-Oil and Indirect Coal-Oil. The Coal-Oil industry is a strategic choice for China to cope with the oil crisis. Due to the high water consumption, however, the industry brings about many controversies. Based on water footprint theory, we calculated the blue water footprints and gray water footprints of the planned coal-oil industries in the nation's five largest coal bases: Shendong, Jindong, Ningdong, Shanbei and Xinjiang Yili. The water footprint includes direct water footprint and life cycle water footprint. The former means the water footprint associated directly with the production while the latter means the water footprint in the whole production supply chain. As the coal-oil industry consumes large amounts of coal and power resources, so the water footprints in coal plant and thermal power plant are both considered in the life cycle water footprint. Thus, we not only calculated the power consumption of the thermal power plant and coal plant themselves but also took the coal consumption in thermal power plant into account. The results show that three out of five coal bases, Shendong, Jindong,and Xinjiang Yili have over 100 million tons of blue water footprint and their gray water footprint exceeded 300 million tons. Among them, for Shendong region as the largest coal-oil producer, these two values reached 190 million tons and 410 million tons respectively. From 2015 on,every year 7.26 million tons of oil is expected to be produced. Among the blue water and gray water footprints, the life cycle water footprint that includes coal and power resources water footprints accounted for nearly 50%. Therefore the life cycle water footprint has become a very important part of the water footprint. In addition the coal plant water footprint is much greater than thermal power plant. Compared with the local regional water resources, the utilization of water resources in Ningdong region is the largest (28.2%) and Xinjiang Yili region the smallest (0.36%). The results also show the regional average blue water and gray water footprints data of the coal-oil industry is basically the same: to produce 1 ton of oil the average blue water footprint is 20-26 tons while the gray water is 56-62 tons. All in all, the coal-oil industry layout planning should follow the principles of supply-side management and be based on local water resources and water environmental capability.