Abstract Oil shale is a sedimentary rock, it is increasingly attracting widespread attention as petroleum supplement energy. Using borehole hydraulic mining techniques to mine oil shale seams at a certain depth in the underground, first and foremost is the use of high pressure water jet to make the overall oil shale ore broken into small pieces and peel them off parent rock. Based on the bionic theories, to design the bionic nozzles are adding several bionic units in the internal flow channel surface of the nozzle, it makes the original smooth flow channel inside the nozzle has become bionic non-smooth surface structure, to some extent, effectively improved the hydraulic characteristics of the nozzle internal flow channel, and reduced the flow resistance of the water. Based on CFD simulation and analysis, the reasons for upgrading effect of the crushed oil shale by the bionic nozzle high pressure water jet are analyzed. Experiments show that, in the same working conditions, bionic nozzle compared with the normal nozzle of the same structure parameters, the diameter of the erosion and crushing pit on oil shale samples expanded 4 mm, and the crushing pit depth deepened 3.8 mm using bionic nozzle.