Western Siberia oil and gas bearing province is the world’s largest province of oil and gas reserves and resources. It occupies the lowland of the same name and the water area of the Southern Kara Sea. Administratively, it is located within the Yamal-Nenets and Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Areas, the Tyumen and Tomsk Regions, part of the Krasnoyarsk Territory (the left bank of the Yenisei River), the Omsk, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk Regions.

Systematic exploration of oil and gas started here in 1948. The first gas field, Berezovskoye was discovered in 1953 while drilling a stratigraphic well in the Upper Jurassic rocks. A commercial gas inflow was received in 1962 from the Upper Cretaceous (Cenomanian) deposits when drilling the Tazovskaya stratigraphic well. In a rather short period giant and unique fields were discovered: Gubkinskoye and Zapolyarnoye in 1965, Komsomolskoye and Urengoyskoye in 1966, Medvezhye in 1967, Yamburgskoye in 1969.

By the beginning of the 2000s, 575 hydrocarbon fields of various types, phases and volumes, including more than 200 fields with free gas deposits (two of them offshore the Kara Sea and two in the Ob Bay) were discovered within the province.