Since the 1960s, the Western Siberian oil boom has led to Nizhnevartovsk's rapid growth from a small settlement to a city due to its location beside the Samotlor oil field along the right bank of the Ob River, 30 kilometers (19 mi) from the border with Tomsk Oblast, and the presence of the petroleum industry has made it one of the wealthiest cities in Russia.

[11]Nizhnevartovsk is located in the Sredneobskaya lowland of the West Siberian plain in the middle reaches of the Ob river on its right Bank.

In 2015, the largest flooding of territories adjacent to Nizhnevartovsk in thirty years occurred, including numerous dachas and gardening associations.

For cedar trees, a good development of the grass-shrub layer is characteristic, in which the dominant value belongs to forest shrubs (blueberries, cranberries, watermelons, marsh bagulnik) and taiga smallgrass (Linnea Severnaya, kislitsa, maynik dvulistnogo).

[14] Nizhnevartovsk was founded in 1909 (or 1905), built as a service point for merchant steamships operating on the Ob River to acquire stocks of firewood to power their boats.

The new village had five homes with a population of eleven people, and was named Nizhnevartovskoye (Нижневартовское), in reference to the Vartovskaya River, a tributary of the Ob located 180 versts (190 km; 120 mi) downstream.

Nizhnevartovsk remained a relatively small settlement until the 1960s when the Soviet authorities began widespread prospecting for the petroleum industry in the Western Siberia region, discovering the Samotlor oil field, one of the largest oil fields in the world, beneath the nearby Lake Samoltor to the north of Nizhnevartovsk.

The discovery saw its rapid development and growth from a large village to a boomtown, Komsomol volunteers were brought in from across the country to construct the city, and Nizhnevartovsk's population skyrocketed from 2300 people in 1959 to 15,663 in 1970.

Nizhnevartovsk features prominently in the opening of Tom Clancy's novel Red Storm Rising, which details a hypothetical war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

In the novel, Nizhnevartovsk is depicted as a significant center for petroleum in the Soviet Union until it is sabotaged, causing a major economic crisis which triggers World War III.