Abstract. Aromatic hydrocarbons are the main composition in coal tar from industrial coal processing process, which have long been recognized as the major environment pollutant. The biological toxicity of aromatic hydrocarbons are closely related to their structural configurations. In this work, detailed composition of aromatic species during fast pyrolysis of Shandong coal were identified and classified to evaluate their toxicities based on the specific structure features. In total, 83 kinds of aromatic hydrocarbons were identified and the most abundant aromatic hydrocarbons were toluene, p-xylene, 1-ethylidene-1H-Indene, and 1,2-dehydro-as-hydrindacene. Carbon number of aromatic hydrocarbons ranged from 6 for benzene to 16 for the alkyl-substituted phenanthrene and the content of C 8 aromatic hydrocarbons was largest. The ring of aromatic hydrocarbons is distributed from 1 to 4 and their contents decrease gradually with increasing of ring number.