The United Arab Emirates declared Tuesday it will depart from OPEC and OPEC+, concluding almost 60 years of membership in the oil producers’ organization. This decision eliminates the cartel’s third-biggest producer just one day before members were scheduled to convene in Vienna, occurring during the ninth week of conflict between Iran and the US-Israeli coalition.
The departure becomes effective May 1, granting Abu Dhabi complete authority over production capacity it has developed for years toward 5 million barrels daily, liberating the UAE from the quota framework through which Saudi Arabia has managed Gulf oil policy for decades.
Rauf Mammadov, formerly with SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state oil company and currently at Fuld & Company, informed The Media Line the OPEC departure represented “a significant blow to OPEC and particularly to Saudi Arabia.” Riyadh, according to Mammadov, has faced challenges maintaining market control since 2015, when global oil production balance started shifting from OPEC to non-cartel producers. He calculated UAE production represents 9%-11% of OPEC output and approximately 5% of OPEC+ output, the expanded producer alliance including Russia and other non-OPEC exporters.
UAE Energy Minister Suhail Mohamed Al Mazrouei informed CNBC the nation selected this timing to reduce disruption to remaining producers and explained the decision to The National, an Abu Dhabi newspaper, as a policy-driven evolution matching long-term market fundamentals.
The declaration occurred alongside two additional breaks within the Gulf alliance this week. Both indicated Abu Dhabi was no longer prepared to contribute its political influence to Saudi-led wartime coordination.
Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE president, refused to attend the “Decisiveness Summit” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman organized in Jeddah on Tuesday, dispatching the foreign minister instead. The meeting, designed as the GCC’s primary wartime gathering in the ninth week of the Iran conflict, generated calls for accelerated completion of a Gulf joint missile warning system and expediting new oil, gas, and water projects, according to Jasem Mohamed AlBudaiwi, secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council, the six Arab Gulf monarchies bloc. The Emirati president’s absence deprived the summit of head-of-state authority necessary to convert declarations into binding commitments. The communique’s appeals for accelerated joint defense reflected what the GCC’s most influential non-Saudi member had declined to endorse personally.
Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the UAE presidency, spoke at the Gulf Influencers Forum in Abu Dhabi on Monday. He utilized the platform to openly criticize the Gulf Cooperation Council’s wartime performance. He distinguished between the GCC’s logistical coordination, which he said had operated effectively, and the council’s diplomatic and military stance, which he said had failed. “Politically and militarily, I think their position has been the weakest historically,” Gargash stated, referring to the GCC. The rupture with Riyadh was the public delivery of criticism by a senior Emirati presidency figure, made twenty-four hours before bin Zayed snubbed the Jeddah summit and the UAE departed OPEC.
Ebtesam Al Ketbi, president of the Emirates Policy Centre, described the OPEC departure on social network X as a transition from collective quota-based commitments to sovereign flexibility in managing production. The change, she wrote, would enable faster response to disruptions such as those connected to the Strait of Hormuz.
An analyst at a Dubai-based research center, requesting anonymity, told The Media Line that Vienna, the Jeddah summit, and Gargash’s remarks were not coincidental. The three signals, the analyst explained, are synchronized elements of deliberate diplomatic messaging by Abu Dhabi, with Gargash’s public criticism establishing ideological groundwork, the Jeddah absence serving as visible diplomatic gesture, and the OPEC departure delivering as the operational decision.
The three ruptures this week extended a Saudi-Emirati break visible since New Year’s Eve, when Saudi forces struck an Emirati arms shipment at Yemen’s Mukalla port on December 30, 2025. The UAE withdrew its troops from Yemen on January 3, and the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council dissolved on January 9. The pattern had been openly developing for four months.
Bar-Ilan University energy specialist Elai Rettig told The Media Line the OPEC announcement was both economic and political. The UAE, Rettig explained, has spent years following OPEC production quotas while observing most other members produce above their quotas, misrepresent their production figures, and leave the Saudis and Emiratis to absorb the cost. Departing OPEC, he said, represents the UAE’s declaration that it will no longer comply with Saudi terms.
Brent crude declined after the UAE news before recovering as traders reassessed the risk premium they attach to Gulf production. The political signal overshadowed the market response. The UAE selected a moment when Saudi Arabia faced its weakest Gulf negotiating position in a generation to make the most public possible declaration that the joint Saudi-Emirati posture supporting US Middle East policy for two decades is finished. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi had operated as paired pillars of the security and energy architecture Washington constructed after 2003, with the Abraham Accords formalizing the convergence in 2020. That convergence concluded this week.
The Dubai analyst told The Media Line the timing reflected Abu Dhabi seizing a unique opportunity. Global markets lack reliable supply, the analyst said, and the UAE possesses both spare capacity and infrastructure to deliver it. Adhering to OPEC+ quotas in this specific crisis environment, the analyst said, had become strategically impossible.
Amer Al-Shobaki, an economic researcher specializing in energy affairs, told Al Jazeera the move marks a transition to deeper conflict over oil market leadership, dangerous because it comes from a central Gulf producer with high productive capacity rather than a marginal one.
The Iran war eliminated 7.88 million barrels per day of OPEC production in March, The National reported. OPEC output fell 27% to 20.79 million barrels per day, the largest single-month supply drop for the group in recent decades.
The Strait of Hormuz closure affected Gulf producers unevenly. Saudi Arabia, with the East-West Crude Oil Pipeline running from eastern oil fields to Red Sea terminals, weathered the disruption better than Qatar, whose liquefied natural gas exports have no comparable alternative, or Bahrain, which depends on imports through the channel. The UAE has invested extensively in the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline, routing crude past Hormuz to a Gulf of Oman terminal.
Iran stated Tuesday it has the right to take “necessary and proportionate measures” in the strait, blaming Washington for shipping disruptions.
The Dubai analyst commented the asymmetric Hormuz disruption fundamentally changed the risk-reward calculation of OPEC+ membership for Abu Dhabi. Producers relying entirely on the strait had stopped extraction as their storage filled, while the UAE maintained physical ability to export crude directly to the Gulf of Oman through the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline. Remaining inside OPEC+, the analyst said, effectively meant the UAE was limiting its own unencumbered exports to maintain solidarity with a cartel whose other major members could not physically reach the market. The coordination mechanism, the analyst said, was no longer distributing market burdens fairly and had begun forcing the UAE to “absorb the cost of a geopolitical crisis it possessed the infrastructure to bypass.”
Rettig has monitored the energy logic of the war as it has developed. He told The Media Line that Washington’s temporary lift on Iranian oil sanctions reflected a calculation that the United States was willing to pay short-term market costs to buy time for more decisive action against Iran’s ability to close the strait. The Hormuz closure, the professor added, means the UAE will struggle to export all the oil it can produce, but over the medium-term Abu Dhabi will be able to release more oil onto the market without aligning itself with OPEC quotas.
The same pressure was reshaping other Gulf arrangements that the Iran war had stress-tested. Cartel discipline was one. Qatar’s hosting of Hamas was another.
Qatar’s Adjustment
Israeli political analyst Amit Segal reported earlier this week, citing unnamed sources, that Doha was preparing to end its 20-year hosting of Hamas. Gerd Nonneman, professor of international relations and Gulf studies at Georgetown University in Qatar and editor of the Journal of Arabian Studies, told The Media Line the reporting was not surprising, but its framing missed how the arrangement actually functioned.
“Qatar never considered itself as Hamas’ patron,” Nonneman said. Doha hosted Hamas’ political office and channeled funds to Gaza at Washington and Israel’s request, with Gaza funds moving through Israel itself. The arrangement had been losing utility as mediation efforts stalled. Hamas’ response to Iranian strikes on Qatari territory, Nonneman said, may have proven the tipping point of a policy whose value to Doha had already diminished sharply.
The adjustment extended beyond Hamas to a wider Gulf grievance with Egypt and Al-Azhar. Imad K. Harb of Arab Center Washington DC wrote on April 21 that Gulf intellectuals had publicly criticized Egypt’s reluctance to act more directly supporting the GCC, even after President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi visited Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE to condemn Iran’s strikes. Al-Azhar’s institutional condemnation of Iranian attacks did not arrive until March 17, and Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb’s personal statement came on April 7, more than five weeks after strikes began. Skeptics in the Gulf, Harb wrote, were now “asking whether Cairo really has the GCC’s interests at heart.”
The Saudi-Emirati split has extended beyond Yemen and OPEC. February was the turning point. Hesham Alghannam, a Saudi political scientist and nonresident scholar at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, made the rivalry visible to Washington in a report identifying the Saudi-UAE rivalry as a central GCC fault line. Despite Riyadh’s historical closeness to Abu Dhabi compared with Doha, Alghannam wrote, the Kingdom viewed the Emirates’ assertive foreign policy with alarm, particularly when Saudi and Emirati positions diverged over access to the Arabian Sea and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, the chokepoint linking the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. Absent binding GCC mechanisms to manage such divergences, he warned, the council was liable to “drift toward inconsequentiality.” On Al Jazeera Arabic on Monday evening, hours before the OPEC announcement, Alghannam said Gulf states had capacity to absorb prolonged pressure from the Hormuz crisis longer than Iran could.
Nonneman characterized Riyadh’s response to the OPEC departure as restrained, expecting regret rather than substantive retaliation.
Mammadov said the cascade question for Vienna was whether Kuwait or Bahrain among original OPEC members, or Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan among newer OPEC+ participants, would follow the UAE out. Qatar left OPEC in January 2019, during the diplomatic and trade blockade that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt imposed on Doha from 2017 to 2021. Two Gulf monarchies have now left the cartel during periods of rupture within their own bloc.
The Vienna meeting on Wednesday was the final OPEC gathering in nearly six decades to count the UAE as a member. Russia, the second-largest OPEC+ producer, said Tuesday it would remain in the group and hoped Abu Dhabi’s departure would not unravel the cartel. Saudi Arabia’s options narrowed sharply this week. Riyadh can pressure remaining members to honor agreed production limits and watch Abu Dhabi capture market share, or ease those limits and accept a price collapse.
The Dubai analyst noted that production sovereignty gives Abu Dhabi a diplomatic lever it could not exercise inside the cartel. Outside OPEC+, the UAE can position itself as the sole reliable Gulf supplier during a Hormuz blockade and trade unique export capacity for bilateral security partnerships with major global powers desperate for energy security.
Rettig said the UAE departure forces Saudi Arabia and remaining OPEC members into deeper dependence on Russia, the partnership that has held OPEC+ together since 2016. Moscow’s weight in OPEC+ decisions, he said, will now grow. The shift, Rettig said, means Washington must now coordinate Gulf production diplomacy directly with Abu Dhabi rather than through Saudi Arabia alone, with both governments aligned on keeping the global market well-supplied as the Trump administration manages pressure on Iran and Russia. The UAE, freed from OPEC restrictions, is likely to increase production by roughly 1 million barrels per day, Rettig told The Media Line, “without having to take into account the interests of Saudi Arabia or Russia.”
