The former Soviet Union was one of the world's largest producers of oil. The USSR produced 21% of global oil production in 1990, prior to its breakup. Due to the Soviet oil industry's general inefficiency, by 1985 the oil industry was consuming around 18% of its reserves to continue extracting oil and gas. This inefficiency continued to rise thereafter.
The exhaustion of traditional oil and gas fields has led to the search for new reserves in ever-more remote regions of the Arctic, Far East, and western Siberia. From 1970 to 1990, oil, coal, and gas output from these outlying regions to the European part of the country rose almost tenfold; crude oil output increased by 4,200%.
With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the fossil fuel industries entered a period of rapid decline: between 1991 and 1993, total investment in Russia's oil and gas industry fell by 46% and 29% respectively, and output fell. Oil production fell by over 100 million tonnes/year, or 17%, between 1990 and 1993.
Production growth has only been recorded in the European North (the Pechora region in the Komi Republic) where increased output by joint ventures usually outweighs the worst performance by state-owned companies.