The determination of effective thermal conductivity of wax deposits is an important part of calculation of the heat transfer in wax deposition. Based on the analysis of effective thermal conductivity calculation method of heterogeneous binary mixture, a model suitable for calculating effective thermal conductivity of wax deposits is determined, and the influence of different effective thermal conductivity calculation methods on heat transfer characteristics of pipelines is compared and analyzed. The results show that the effective thermal conductivity of wax deposits becomes larger with the increase of mass fraction of wax in the sediments. Under the same mass fraction of wax, effective thermal conductivity calculated by parallel model is the largest, followed by ME2 model, EMT model and series model, and the calculation results of ME2 model and EMT model are close. The hypothesis of EMT model is similar to the structure distribution of actual wax deposits, so it is recommended to use the EMT model to calculate effective thermal conductivity of wax deposits. The temperature along the pipe section calculated by EMT model and M correlation is very close, and radial temperature gradient obtained by EMT model is higher than M correlation. Generally speaking, the heat transfer calculation results of pipelines obtained by EMT model and M correlation have little difference, but correlation is more convenient and has certain advantages.