The Ob is mainly used for irrigation, drinking water, hydropower and fisheries, the river has more than 50 species of fish.Navigable waters of the Ob basin reach a total length of 9300 miles (15,000 km). The importance of shipping to transport the Ob basin was particularly high before the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway, as, despite the generally south-north direction of the flow of most of Ob and its tributaries, the width of the Ob basin waiting (somewhat indirectly) of transport in the east-west direction as well. Until the early 20th century, an important river port in western Tyumen is located along the river Tura, a tributary of the Tobol. Achieved by an extension of the Ekaterinburg-Perm railway in 1885, and get a rail link with the Kama and Volga rivers in central Russia, became an important Tyumen railway station a few years until "the railroad extended to the east. In the eastern basin of Ob, Tomsk, on the river Tom was an important term.
Tyumen was the first steamboat in 1836, and rows of middle Ob River was navigated by steamboats since the 1845th The first steamboat on the Ob, Nikita Myasnikov of "Osnova", was launched in 1844, but the beginning was difficult at first, and it was not until 1857 that the expedition ship has started to develop in the OB system seriously. Steamships began operating on the Yenisei in 1863, the Lena and Amur in the 1870s. In an attempt to extend the navigable additional Ob, a system of canals, using Ket River, 560 miles (900 km) long in total were built in the late 19th century to link the Ob to the Yenisei but quickly abandoned as being competitive with the railroad.
The Trans-Siberian railway, once completed, provided for more direct, the year of transport in the east-west direction. But the Ob River system remained important to connect the vast expanses of the region of Tyumen and Tomsk Oblast in the major cities along the Trans-Siberian Railway, as Novosibirsk or Omsk. In the second half of the 20th century, the construction of rail links Labytnangi, Tobolsk, and oil and gas towns of Surgut, Nizhnevartovsk and always in rail terminals, but does not diminish the importance of waterways for places however, be reached by train.
The dam was built near Novosibirsk in 1956, which established the then-largest artificial lake in Siberia, Novosibirsk Reservoir called.
In 1960 to 1980, the project was considered a giant Soviet engineers and system administrators to delegate some of the Ob and Irtysh water in Kazakhstan and the Soviet republics in Central Asia, which completes the Aral Sea as well. The project never left the drawing board, was abandoned in 1986 due to economic and environmental considerations.
