Recently, there has been growing interest in developing Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) to operate for longer mission durations as well as with higher levels of autonomy. This paper describes the current state of the art in methodologies to enable long range AUVs and provides a detailed literature review of some existing AUVs characterizing their operation endurance. Path planning is identified as the core and crucial components to improve AUV persistence. The aims of path optimization, path re-planning adapting to the dynamic environments, and cooperative path planning of multiple AUVs have received much attention from the research community. This paper presents a review of the main research works focusing on these three technology areas. The main objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive survey of shape and properties of the path and optimization techniques for path planning. These techniques and algorithms have been classified into different classes and their assumptions and drawbacks have been discussed. Finally, the paper discusses the AUV literature in general and highlights challenges that need to be addressed in developing AUVs with advanced autonomy and capable of operating for longer mission durations.