Production of oil and gas is the core activity of LUKOIL Group.
Liquid hydrocarbons represent approximately 80% of our overall production volumes. LUKOIL operates in six countries and accounts for approximately 2% of global oil production.
Excluding the West Qurna-2 project, our oil production was flat year-on-year in 2018, totaling 85.6 million tonnes.
In 2017 and 2018, the volume and dynamics of LUKOIL Group's daily oil production were mainly influenced by external production limitations under the agreement between Russia and OPEC. After the limitations had been changed in the second half of 2018, LUKOIL quickly ramped up its oil production in Russia through effective production management at its mature fields.
In 2018, LUKOIL produced 82.0 million tonnes of crude oil in Russia, in line with the 2017 levels and accounting for 14.8% of Russia's total production, as reported by CDU TEK.
Given the limited total volume of oil production, we continued to ramp up our production at large, highly productive fields as planned while further reducing production at our mature fields in West Siberia and Timan-Pechora.
In particular, we ramped up the highly productive V. Filanovsky and Pyakyakhinskoye fields to their designed capacity, launched Phase 2 at the Yu. Korchagin field, and increased high-viscosity oil production at the Yaregskoye and Usinskoye fields in Timan-Pechora. As a result, the share of these highly productive fields in the total production of LUKOIL Group, excluding the West Qurna-2 project, totaled 15% in 2018, up 3 percentage points year-on-year. Oil production was launched at three new fields in the Timan-Pechora and Volga regions during the year.
In 2018, gas production increased by 16.2% year-on-year to 33.5 billion cubic meters as our projects in Uzbekistan ramped up to designed capacity. Our overall gas production in Russia decreased by 2.0% year-on-year to 17.8 billion cubic meters.
Gas production from our international projects increased by 47.3% to 15.7 billion cubic meters and provided 46.9% of LUKOIL's total gas production, up 9.9 percentage points year-on-year.
