View / The UAE’s OPEC exit is no surprise

The UAE said today it would leave OPEC and OPEC+, effective May 1. Shock is the word most news reports have reached for. It shouldn’t be.

This moment has been building for almost a decade. Abu Dhabi disagrees with OPEC’s quota system which didn’t keep pace with the reality of the UAE’s rising production capacity. In 2021, the UAE refused to sign on to a production-cut extension — not because it opposed the principle, but because the baseline used to calculate its share was anchored to 2018 output figures that had since been overtaken by billions of dollars in new upstream investment.

The UAE’s Energy Minister, Suhail Al Mazrouei said at the time that OPEC’s formula was penalizing the country for expanding its capacity. While OPEC eventually relented in June 2024, granting the UAE a higher baseline of 3.5 million barrels per day (bpd), it was a partial fix to a structural problem. The state-run producer ADNOC has now boosted capacity to 4.85 million bpd, with a goal of hitting 5 million by 2030. The gap between what the UAE can pump and what OPEC allows it to produce is widening.

At some point, membership stops being a seat at the table and starts being a cage. Other countries have made similar conclusions. Qatar exited in January 2019, framing the decision around its pivot to liquefied natural gas. Ecuador followed in 2020, and Angola left in 2024 after a quota dispute over some 70,000 barrels per day.

The common thread across these exits is not ideology or geopolitics. It is arithmetic. Countries leave OPEC when the cost of compliance — in forgone production, revenue, investment — exceeds whatever benefit membership provides. For smaller producers operating near or below their quotas, that calculation tips quickly.

The more interesting question is why the big ones don’t leave. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait remain inside OPEC not because the quota system favors them, but because OPEC is, in practice, their instrument. The group’s ability to move markets during a price collapse — as it demonstrated in 2020, slashing output by nearly 10 million bpd in a matter of weeks — depends on the credibility of collective action. Large producers stay because they built the institution, they run it, and they need it to work when oil prices plummet.

What makes the UAE’s move different — even shocking to some who don’t follow OPEC dynamics closely — is that it isn’t a small producer. It has among the most spare capacity of any OPEC member, and it has signaled it intends to extract and sell that capacity — “gradually and measured,” in its official language today, but deploy it nonetheless. Every barrel the UAE adds to the market is a barrel that the remaining OPEC members must subtract from their own to hold prices steady when crude flow through the Strait of Hormuz resumes.

OPEC+ is already managing collective cuts of around 6 million bpd. Removing the UAE from that framework redistributes these cuts. Saudi Arabia, which has repeatedly absorbed the largest share of voluntary cuts to compensate for quota violators like Iraq and Kazakhstan, now faces an even heavier lift.

OPEC was designed for an era when producers needed each other to survive. Countries with cheap extraction costs, massive reserves, and diversified economies — the UAE fits all three — can increasingly afford to go it alone. For states with higher break-even prices and few non-oil revenues, the group is essential. The irony is that the members most dependent on OPEC’s price management are increasingly the ones making the institution less credible by not complying with their quotas.

The UAE’s exit won’t kill OPEC, but it exposes a structural flaw the group has long deferred. Its quota system rewards restraint over investment, even as producers race to monetize reserves before the energy transition narrows the field to the lowest-cost barrels. In that competition, loyalty is an expensive virtue.

Wael Mahdi is an independent commentator specializing in OPEC and Saudi Arabia’s economy, and co-author of “OPEC in a Shale Oil World: Where to Next?”