Abstract: In order to meet the requirements of low power consumption, miniaturization, short response time, high reliability and good safety of distributed wireless methane sensors, the working principles and research progress of low-power catalytic combustion, thermal conductivity and electrical conductivity methane sensors based on micro-electro-mechanical system technology and nano materials are introduced. This paper analyzes their advantages and disadvantages, and proposes the development direction and prospect of low-power methane sensors. ① The low-power catalytic combustion methane sensor can measure low-concentration methane. However, it is easy to be poisoned and the sensor has low stability. Due to the need of being high operated temperature, the low-power catalytic combustion methane sensor generally has high power consumption. The average power consumption of the sensors can be reduced to less than 2 mW under the work mode of pulse operation. However, its stability is not high. The future research directions are to improve packaging or catalytic materials to enhance its anti-poisoning ability, and to study low-power catalytic combustion methane sensors without manual calibration by combining advanced algorithms such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. ② The low-power thermal conductivity methane sensor can to measure methane in the full range. It can measure both low-concentration and high-concentration methane at the same time. It can operate stably in mines and has strong adaptability to the underground environment of mines. It has the prospect of application of distributed wireless methane sensors. The future development direction is to improve the circuit module to realize the sleep-wake operation mode, and to study the integration technology of sensor elements and peripheral circuits to realize the on-chip integrated thermal conductivity methane sensing system to reduce the overall operation power consumption. ③ The low-power conductivity methane sensors are divided into room temperature type and micro-heating plate type. The room temperature conductivity methane sensor has lower power consumption but longer response time. The micro-heating plate conductivity methane sensor has relatively low power consumption. Combined with specific nano materials, it can respond to methane at lower operating temperature, and has the application prospect of low-concentration methane monitoring. However, the micro-heating plate methane sensor is generally sensitive to ambient humidity. The baseline is easily shifted, the adhesion of sensitive materials to electrodes is poor, the device repeatability and reliability are poor, and the sensitive materials and packaging process need to be further improved. The magnetron sputtering method is applied to deposit semiconductor oxide sensitive materials onto the electrodes to improve the adhesion of the materials, thereby improving the repeatability and reliability of the device. At the same time, it is necessary to combine the algorithm to correct the baseline shift to ensure the stable operation of micro-heating plate conductivity sensors. ④ From the perspective of the whole sensing system, the power consumption of the peripheral circuit of the sensing element is sometimes even higher than that of the sensing element itself. The future direction is to study the on-chip integrated methane sensor, which can greatly reduce the power consumption of the peripheral circuit and obtain extreme low-power methane sensor. ⑤ It is proposed to study advanced sensor self-calibration algorithms to realize distributed wireless low-power methane sensors without manual calibration or self-calibration.