Why the UAE decided it no longer needs the OPEC cage

The timing was almost theatrical. All day Tuesday, Emirati officials and government-aligned accounts had seeded social media with hints that something transformative was coming.

Then Mohammed bin Salman took his chair in Jeddah. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince — and, increasingly, Abu Dhabi’s chief rival for Gulf supremacy — had convened an emergency GCC summit. He had barely called the room to order when Abu Dhabi detonated its surprise.

After nearly six decades, the UAE ​was abandoning OPEC — the cartel long dominated by Riyadh and wielded as an instrument of Saudi strategic power. For the Emirates, it had become a cage.

This week, Gulf Currents unpacks why, as ‌Abu Dhabi quietly recalibrates its alliances in OPEC’s wake. We examine how the cartel became a constraint the UAE could no longer accept, the vulnerabilities lurking beneath the Strait of Hormuz — and how one oligarch’s yacht slipped effortlessly through the world’s most fraught waterway.

The UAE has left OPEC because, simply put, it doesn’t need it anymore.

Abu Dhabi has built the off-ramp from oil dependency that Gulf states ​have long promised and rarely delivered. Non-oil GDP hit 77.3 per cent of real output in the first quarter of 2025 — a single figure that explains the exit better than any official statement.

ADNOC has been pushing toward 5 million barrels per day ​of capacity by 2027 as it seeks to cement its transition while maximising revenue from current demand for oil and gas. That target was always hard to square with OPEC quotas — most recently set at around 3.8 million barrels per day — built around someone else’s fiscal needs.

There are, of course, other reasons the UAE walked away, not least its deepening political rivalry with Saudi Arabia.

The two countries have backed opposing forces in Yemen, competed for foreign investment, and clashed repeatedly over OPEC quota allocations that many in Abu Dhabi felt ​were calibrated to Riyadh’s needs rather than their own.

But strip away the geopolitics and the calculation at the core is more straightforward: OPEC was holding the UAE back.

“It does not want its productive capacity to be constrained ​by OPEC, and certainly not by Riyadh,” said Neil Quilliam, associate fellow at Chatham House. Leaving OPEC clears the runway.

This is where the contrast with Saudi Arabia sharpens. For Riyadh, OPEC remains a primary instrument of geopolitical leverage and fiscal survival — the ‌kingdom’s breakeven oil ⁠price is around $90 a barrel, against the UAE’s sub-$50 figure, according to the IMF.

But the UAE has built a post-oil identity as a trade, finance, tourism and technology hub, and simply no longer shares Riyadh’s calculus.

Karen Young, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, sees the departure as part of a broader strategy “to move volumes and products when and how they see fit — oil, gas, renewables — and to prepare themselves for a new era of global energy security.”

That points to a calculated “harvest and diversify” logic: pump as much oil as possible while there is still a market for it, and use those revenues to cement the diversified economy already well underway.

The numbers tell their own story. At ​pre-war Brent prices of around $61 a barrel, an additional ​1.2 million barrels per day would have been ⁠worth roughly $27 billion a year. At today’s $111, that figure nearly doubles to $49 billion.

The war has rewritten the revenue calculus entirely — even as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil flows, blocks the very route Abu Dhabi would need to collect it.

The UAE has decided it no longer needs to ​coordinate its future with a cartel built for a world it is actively leaving behind.