The process of petroleum involves in a large amount of oily wastewater that contains high levels of chemical oxygen demand (COD) and toxic compounds. So they must be treated before their discharge into the receptor medium. In this paper, wet peroxide oxidation (WPO) was adopted to treat the oily wastewater. Central composite design, an experimental design for response surface methodology (RSM), was used to create a set of 31 experimental runs needed for optimizing of the operating conditions. Quadratic regression models with estimated coefficients were developed to describe the COD removals. The experimental results show that WPO could effectively reduce COD by 96.8% at the optimum conditions of temperature $290^{circ}C$, $H_2O_2$ excess (HE) 0.8, the initial concentration of oily wastewater 3855 mg/L and reaction time 9 min. RSM could be effectively adopted to optimize the operating multifactors in complex WPO process.