The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has announced its withdrawal from the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the broader OPEC+ alliance, effective May 1, 2026, ending a membership that stretches back nearly six decades and delivering one of the most consequential blows to the cartel in its history.
The announcement, made Tuesday, April 28, 2026, in an official statement from the UAE Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, came as OPEC prepared to convene in Vienna and as the ongoing Iran war continued to disrupt Gulf energy markets.
The UAE was OPEC’s third-largest producer, behind only Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and had been a member since 1967, initially through the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, and as a unified sovereign state from 1971.
“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. This is what we will focus on going forward,” the ministry said in its statement.
The exit marks a seismic shift in the architecture of global oil governance. Analysts at Rystad Energy described it as creating “a structurally weaker OPEC,” with the longer-term implications likely to outweigh any near-term market effects.
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The Baker Institute had previously warned that a UAE departure would be “the most high-profile departure from the group to date, overshadowing Qatar’s 2019 exit.”
The immediate market response was sharp as US crude oil surpassed US$100 per barrel following the announcement; the first time it had crossed that threshold since earlier this month, as investors priced in the combined effect of the UAE’s exit and stalled Iran nuclear talks.
The departure has been years in the making. Under the OPEC+ framework, the UAE had been constrained to a production ceiling of approximately three million barrels per day (bpd), despite holding nameplate capacity in excess of four million barrels per day.
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Abu Dhabi’s national energy company, ADNOC, has been targeting five million barrels per day by 2027, an ambition fundamentally incompatible with the quota discipline that OPEC+ requires.
Freed from those constraints, the UAE is widely expected to ramp up output, though the timeline remains uncertain while the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s crude oil and liquefied natural gas normally transits, remains effectively closed due to Iranian threats and attacks on shipping.
The Energy Information Administration estimates that Gulf producers have collectively shut in approximately 9.1 million bpd in April as a result of the Hormuz crisis, limiting the immediate production upside of the UAE’s exit.
In its statement, the ministry was careful to frame the decision not as a rupture but as a strategic evolution. “This decision does not alter the UAE’s commitment to global market stability or its approach based on cooperation with producers and consumers. Rather, it enhances the UAE’s ability to respond to evolving market needs,” it said.
The UAE, however, said it had made “even greater sacrifices” during its OPEC membership, ostensibly an allusion to the Iranian missile and drone attacks Abu Dhabi has sustained since the outbreak of the Iran war — attacks launched by a fellow OPEC member.
The UAE’s diplomatic adviser to the president, Anwar Gargash, had been explicit the day before the announcement, saying that Gulf Cooperation Council countries’ political and military response to the Iranian attacks had been “the weakest historically.”
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The exit also carries a clear energy transition dimension. The ministry explicitly cited investment across “oil, gas, renewables, and low-carbon solutions” as central to the UAE’s post-OPEC identity, a framing more consistent with the country’s 2050 net-zero commitment and its hosting of COP28 than with the supply-management mandate of a crude exporters’ cartel.
The UAE becomes the second Gulf state to leave OPEC in recent years, following Qatar’s departure in 2019. How Saudi Arabia, which effectively controls OPEC’s direction, responds to the loss of its third-largest member will be the defining question at this week’s Vienna meeting, and potentially for the organisation’s medium-term credibility.
*This is a developing story.
