UAE’s OPEC Exit: Pragmatic Oil Policy, Not ‘Stranded Assets’ Panic

From Tilak’s Substack

Tilak Doshi

The United Arab Emirates’ announcement on Tuesday that it will leave OPEC and OPEC+ effective May 1st sent shockwaves through the energy world. As the cartel’s third-largest oil producer, with a production capacity approaching five million barrels per day and ambitions to push higher, the UAE was no peripheral player. Abu Dhabi joined OPEC back in 1967 — before the UAE federation existed in its modern form — and the unified UAE carried that legacy for nearly six decades.

The exit decision was framed by Emirati officials as a “policy-driven evolution” in pursuit of “long-term strategic and economic vision”. Within hours, a familiar trope emerged among media commentators: the UAE, fearing the inexorable global march towards Net Zero, is racing to avoid ‘stranded assets’. Oil will be left in the ground, you see, because electric vehicles in China and Europe’s Green Deal will soon render the black stuff obsolete.

Watch out for stranded assets!

The stranded assets narrative is the climate alarmists’ weapon of choice. In behavioural economics, the tenet of loss aversion suggests that the fear of a tangible loss is far more effective than hope for putative gains in shaping actions. For over two decades, climate activists and financial pundits have argued that fossil fuels — coal mines, oil and gas fields, pipelines, refineries — would soon suffer the fate of the buggy whip on the eve of the automobile age. The energy transition, they insisted, would ‘strand’ trillions of dollars in hydrocarbon assets as the world turns away from carbon-intensive fuels.

Climate activists have long claimed that technological progress in energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies combined with climate policies pursued by governments around the world will lead to substantial falls in demand for fossil fuels. A Financial Times column in 2020, for instance, claimed that the pursuit of climate change policies would “evaporate” a third of the current value of the big oil and gas companies. If countries met their Paris Agreement commitments and kept to the “no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels” target, 50% of all coal, oil and gas resources would be “stranded” and, by definition, have zero value. If the stricter 1.5°C maximum is aimed for, then 80% of the world’s fossil fuels would be stranded.

Citing ‘consensus science’ (an oxymoron), climate change models purportedly linking carbon dioxide emissions with ‘climate risk’ are used to calculate the necessary cuts in oil, gas and coal production. Hence BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager and an early purveyor of the ESG movement, warned over a decade ago that “the majority of fossil fuel reserves will need to be left in the ground” if global warming is not to exceed 2°C. Along the same lines, consultants for the OECD asserted that “vast quantities of resource reserves will need to remain underground in order to stabilise the climate”.

Turning to UAE’s decision to exit OPEC this week, an Oxford don in “energy systems” captured the climate-focused zeitgeist in a commentary published on Wednesday. He argued that as China electrifies transport, demand for oil will “plateau”, and the UAE — already ahead of the Saudis with its 2050 Net Zero target versus Riyadh’s 2060 — is wisely sidestepping the risk of unsellable reserves. This, we are told, explains why the Gulf heavyweight is ditching the cartel’s quotas for production flexibility. The UAE can then, in this narrative, produce oil as rapidly as possible before it goes out of fashion.

A Middle East expert from Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston commented in Channel News Asia on Thursday that the UAE’s decision to exit “reflects a desire to monetise its reserves and move the oil to market to avoid the risk of stranded assets should global demand fall in any future transition away from fossil fuels. Shorn of the constraints of OPEC quotas… officials in Abu Dhabi will be able to increase production should it wish to do so once the impasse with Iran is broken and the Strait of Hormuz fully reopens.”

To more conventional oil analysts, the “stranded assets” theme is worn and threadbare. Fatih Birol, Chief Executive of the IEA, published the astonishing Net Zero “roadmap” with much fanfare in May 2021, calling for a global stop to all new investments in fossil fuels since they were going to be “stranded” anyway. It duly attracted its share of derision from Gulf oil producers with skin in the game, as in the case of the Saudi oil minister who called the report a sequel to “La La Land”. There is perhaps no player as big as Saudi Arabia that can claim ‘skin in the game’.

Barclays PLC dropped a bombshell white paper in February titled ‘Transition Realism: A Stranded Asset Perspective on the Energy Transition’. The report pulls no punches. After years of being lectured that fossil fuels are the quintessential stranded assets — trillions in oil, gas and coal reserves doomed to remain unused underground as the world races to Net Zero – we now learn that the real risks now lurk in the renewable sector. “Stranded-asset risk is becoming system wide. … Historically, stranding meant coal plants. Today, renewables facing multi-year interconnection queues, curtailment and congestion risks are increasingly likely to be impaired.”

The question of national interest

The UAE has chafed for years under OPEC quotas that capped its output at around 3.4 million barrels per day while its sustainable capacity sits at 4.8 million and climbing. Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) has invested heavily to expand, only to be restrained by OPEC quotas under Saudi-led discipline.

The Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have compounded the frustration. UAE exports able to bypass the Hormuz chokepoint via the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline have a capacity to transport 1.5-1.8 million barrels of oil per day. By exiting OPEC, the UAE gains the freedom to ramp up on its own terms, redirect capital to secure export routes and align more closely with the US whose shale revolution has already done more to erode cartel power than any UN climate conference ever could. But in the short run, the UAE is constrained by the pipeline capacity until the Strait of Hormuz is released from blockades.

Climate zealots cannot see a sovereign nation’s rational self-interest without projecting their own apocalyptic fantasies onto it. The UAE is not some farsighted convert to the renewables revolution, nor is Saudi Arabia the dim-witted Arab cousin stubbornly clinging to a dying fossil fuels industry. Both are hard-nosed pragmatists operating in a world where oil demand remains robust, geopolitics trumps virtue-signalling and government promises of distant Net Zero targets are worth about as much as the paper they’re printed on.

The real story, buried beneath the stranded-assets hysteria, is one of production quotas, regional rivalries, wars and blocked maritime chokepoints for oil and gas trade, and the enduring power of market realities over green ideology. US fracking — 13.2 million barrels per day in January 2026, up from 5.4 million in 2010 — has achieved what decades of diplomatic arm-twisting could not. OPEC’s 2014 attempt to flood the market and crush American oil and gas producers backfired spectacularly, forcing US shale to become profitable at $50-$60 per barrel.

This is well below the fiscal break-even oil price for most OPEC members, that is, the price that helps balance government budgets. IMF projections indicate that Saudi Arabia requires roughly $95 per barrel to balance its 2025 budget, while the UAE maintains a lower breakeven around $50 per barrel.

And yet the stranded-assets mantra persists. Even as physical Brent crude spikes above $110 amid the Hormuz disruptions — reminding everyone that energy security is not a luxury but a necessity — the Oxford academic and his ilk insist the UAE is acting on long-term demand decline. Never mind that China’s electrification is built on a coal-fired grid that shows no sign of rapid decarbonisation. Government pledges 25 or 30 years out are worth less than used Tesla batteries.

The UAE, sitting atop some of the world’s lowest-cost oil reserves, is hardly about to abandon that absolute advantage on the altar of UN target ‘commitments’ for carbon mitigation. Saudi Arabia’s continued commitment to oil is no act of denialism either. Both Gulf powers understand what Western elites refuse to: global fossil fuel demand is not plateauing. The UAE’s exit is about flexibility — production policy, export security, and foreign policy autonomy — not a sudden conversion to the Church of Climate.

The UAE has distanced itself from cartel constraints while deepening US ties, a move accelerated by the Iran war which exposed the limited nature of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council solidarity. UAE Presidential adviser Anwar Gargash said the Gulf states supported each other logistically in the crisis, but he lambasted their political and military response: “The GCC’s stance was the weakest historically, considering the nature of the attack and the threat it posed to everyone.” Riyadh, for its part, retains the swing-producer role and the fiscal buffers to weather volatility. Neither are ‘unenlightened’; both are playing the long game in a multi-polar energy market where US shale, not solar panels, has humbled OPEC+.

Climate delusions vs petrostate statecraft

The broader lesson is one of persistent delusion. Anti-fossil fuel advocates have spent years portraying every market signal — OPEC cuts, price spikes, producer exits — as proof of their eschatology. Qatar left in 2019 for gas focus; Angola in 2024 over quota disputes; Ecuador and others before them. These were pragmatic adjustments, not harbingers of stranded reserves.

The UAE’s departure, the largest and most consequential since the cartel’s founding, weakens OPEC+ materially and reputationally, but it does so because of internal rifts, US supply abundance and regional conflict — not because Abu Dhabi’s planners have swallowed the IEA’s Net Zero Kool-Aid.

As the Hormuz crisis underscores, the world still runs on oil. Brent’s surge to over $110 after UAE’s exit notice was not a panicked farewell to fossil fuels but a reminder of supply vulnerability. The UAE will produce more, invest in bypass infrastructure and contribute to stability “in a measured and responsible manner”, as its statement noted. It appreciates OPEC’s past efforts while moving on. That is statesmanship, not surrender to the green transition fairy tale.

The climate establishment’s inability to see this reveals more about the ideology of its adherents than about Gulf energy strategy. They project their own wishful thinking — EU Net Zero by 2050, China’s miraculous pivot to renewables, an early plateau to global fossil fuel demand — onto rational actors who understand that energy abundance underpins prosperity and security.

Stranded assets? The only things truly at risk of stranding are the trillions squandered on intermittent renewables that cannot replace hydrocarbons at scale without massive economic losses. The UAE knows this. So does Saudi Arabia. It is high time the West’s virtue-signalling policymakers stopped lecturing them.

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.