UAE Withdraws From OPEC and OPEC+ Effective May 1, Marking a Historic Inflection Point for Global Energy Governance

The United Arab Emirates has formally confirmed it will end its decades-long membership in OPEC and the broader OPEC+ coalition starting May 1, closing a chapter that stretches back to 1967 — four full years before the UAE was established as an independent sovereign nation. The watershed decision represents a definitive turning point in the Gulf state’s posture and role within the global energy landscape.

Published via the country’s official state news agency WAM, the government’s statement framed the move as the outcome of a full, cross-agency review of the UAE’s national oil production policy and installed output capacity, positioning it as a direct reflection of the country’s “long-term strategic and economic vision and evolving energy profile.” Officials emphasized the exit is anchored in core national priorities, as well as a commitment to addressing what it called the global market’s “pressing unmet needs” — a clear reference to widespread supply shortfalls the UAE argues are leaving global demand underserved amid escalating, large-scale supply disruptions.

The statement acknowledged the fraught current geopolitical context for global energy markets, including ongoing hostilities involving Iran that have severely disrupted commercial tanker transit through the Strait of Hormuz: the narrow 39-kilometer waterway straddling Iran and Oman that carries roughly 20% of all global crude oil and liquefied natural gas shipments under normal conditions. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that six major Gulf OPEC+ producers — Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain — saw a combined 7.5 million barrels per day (mbpd) of crude output taken offline in March, a figure that rose to 9.1 mbpd in April. Even so, the UAE was careful to cast the exit as a pre-planned, strategic policy choice rather than an impulsive reaction to recent market shocks, noting that “underlying trends point to sustained growth in global energy demand over the medium to long term.”

Years of Built-Up Tension Preceded the Public Split

Tuesday’s long-awaited announcement did not emerge out of nowhere. The UAE first openly challenged OPEC+’s collective framework back in 2021, when it refused to sign off on a deal to extend coordinated production cuts unless its individual official output quota was adjusted upward. The country argued at the time that it had poured billions of dollars into expanding its upstream production capacity, and was being unfairly hamstrung by outdated quota baselines set back in 2018. While a last-minute compromise averted a collapse of the OPEC+ deal then, the incident laid bare an irreconcilable core conflict: the UAE’s upstream investment strategy was targeted at scaling up output significantly, and OPEC’s rigid quota system stood directly in the way of that goal.

That ambition has only grown in the years since. UAE state energy giant ADNOC has publicly committed to hitting a 5 mbpd production target by 2027, up from its current operating output of roughly 3.4 mbpd. Under existing OPEC+ terms, the UAE had been held to an official quota of just 3.2 mbpd, even as its total installed capacity already surpassed 4 mbpd — a growing gap that made remaining in the bloc increasingly difficult for Abu Dhabi to justify to domestic stakeholders.

The UAE has moved to calm market fears that its exit will trigger unmanaged supply volatility, stressing that the move does not signal a retreat from its commitments to global energy security. Officials have pledged to bring new additional production to global markets “in a gradual and measured manner, aligned with demand and market conditions,” and reaffirmed its full slate of planned investments across oil, gas, renewables, and next-generation low-carbon energy technologies. The statement noted that leaving OPEC will grant the UAE far greater operational flexibility to respond to fast-shifting market dynamics: unlike the binding production caps OPEC imposes on its members, the country will no longer be forced to hold back output even when commercial logic supports selling more crude. The cartel’s core model of restraining collective supply to prop up global oil prices, officials implied, delivers far greater relative benefits to states almost entirely dependent on oil export revenue — a description that fits Saudi Arabia far better than the UAE, where non-oil economic activity now makes up roughly 75% of total national GDP.

Market Reactions and Broader Ripple Effects for OPEC

The global market’s immediate response to the announcement was sharp and unambiguous. Brent crude, the global European benchmark, crossed the $100 per barrel threshold for the first time since April 8, climbing as high as $111 per barrel at time of publication.

The longer-term structural fallout for OPEC, however, carries far greater geopolitical weight. The cartel has been under mounting internal strain for months, with multiple members including Iraq, Kazakhstan, and the UAE repeatedly producing over their official quotas and being forced to implement compensatory extra output cuts to stay compliant. The UAE’s departure removes OPEC’s third-largest crude producer from its ranks at a moment when global supply dynamics are already extremely fragile. The exit also comes six years after Qatar left OPEC in 2019, and lands on the eve of a scheduled in-person OPEC ministerial meeting set to take place in Vienna, Austria on Wednesday.

“The time has come to focus our efforts on what our national interest dictates, and our commitment to our investors, customers, partners and global energy markets,” the UAE’s official statement concluded. The government added that it deeply values the more than five decades of collaborative work it completed as part of OPEC, and wished the organization every success in its future operations.

This report originally appeared on WIRED Middle East.