April 29 (Reuters) – 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.
NEWS BRIEFING
– U.S. President Donald Trump urged Iran to “get smart soon” and sign a deal, warning Tehran “couldn’t get its act together.” The U.S. is reportedly extending its blockade of Iranian ports, squeezing Iran’s economy and oil exports. Negotiations remain deadlocked over Iran’s demand to separate nuclear discussions from formally ending the war.
– The UAE is reviewing its memberships across multilateral organisations but is not planning further withdrawals beyond its surprise exit from OPEC, an Emirati official told Reuters. The reassessment reflects Abu Dhabi’s broader realignment since the Iran war, including frustration with the Gulf Cooperation Council’s response to the conflict, a deepening rift with Saudi Arabia, and closer ties to Israel and the United States.
ANALYSIS: For the UAE, OPEC had become a constraint, not a shield
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% 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.
GRAPHIC OF THE WEEK
Hormuz’s other vulnerability – undersea cables
Iran’s warning that submarine cables in the Strait of Hormuz are a vulnerable target has put critical infrastructure in the spotlight. The strait’s seabed hosts fibre-optic networks carrying the bulk of internet and telecoms traffic between Asia, the Gulf, and Europe — underpinning billions of dollars in Gulf AI and digital investment. While cables have been spared so far, experts warn of unintentional damage from drifting or anchoring vessels. Repairs would face major obstacles: insurer reluctance, permit delays, and post-conflict seabed surveys. Satellites cannot handle the traffic volumes needed to serve as a viable backup.
THE LAST WAVE: Oligarch’s superyacht breezes through world’s most contested strait
In a Gulf where oil tankers sit idle and nerves run high, one vessel enjoyed unusually smooth sailing this week.
Nord, the 465-foot superyacht linked to sanctioned Russian billionaire Alexei Mordashov, slipped through the tightly controlled Strait of Hormuz after maintenance in Dubai — because neither Iran nor the United States objected. Tehran deemed it a friendly civilian passage; Washington raised no questions.
As merchant traffic has fallen to a trickle amid the U.S.-Iran standoff, the yacht barely drew a second glance.
