A huge increase of machines attached to wireless networks is expected in the next few years. A large part of these machines will be covered by some wireless wide area networks. The arrival of cellular M2M (machine-to-machine) communication poses new requirements due to its specific characteristics. For most of the cellular M2M applications, the essential requirement is low energy consumption level or high energy efficiency. This survey provides a global view of the network technologies previewed for cellular M2M. In this survey, we study the existing classifications of M2M applications according to different criteria in the literature. The comparison of traffic characteristics between M2M and human-to-human is also proposed. Quality of service (QoS) requirements for typical M2M applications are resumed. The advance of reference M2M network architectures proposed by the Standard Development Organization (SDO) is investigated. We identify two possible effort directions to improve the energy efficiency for cellular M2M. The first one is to evolve the current existing 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Consortium cellular networks to effectively support MTC (Machine Type Communication). The other direction is to design M2M-dedicated networks from scratch, which are often called low-power wide-area (LPWA) networks. We review, compare and categorize the proposals related to energy issues of cellular M2M mainly over the period 2011-2015 for the first direction. We introduce the development of LPWA networks for the other research directions. We highlight that the cooperative relaying, the design of energy-efficient signaling and operation, the new radio resource allocation schemes, and the energy-efficient random access procedure are the main points of improvement. It is important to jointly use the aforementioned approaches, for example, joint design of random access control and radio resource allocation, to seek for a trade-off between energy efficiency and other system performances.