The United Arab Emirates announced Tuesday it will leave OPEC and OPEC+ on May 1 , dealing a blow to the oil cartel just as a laden supertanker linked to Japan appears to have completed a transit through the Strait of Hormuz, in what may be the first successful attempt by an oil carrier from the country to leave the Persian Gulf since the Iran war began .

The UAE, the world's seventh-largest producer of oil, has announced it will withdraw from Opec after more than five decades , according to The National. The move comes as Brent rose to 111.16 USD/Bbl on April 28, 2026, up 2.71% from the previous day , according to Trading Economics data, while market data shows WTI Crude at $71.50/bbl and Brent Crude at $75.20/bbl as of Tuesday morning.

The United Arab Emirates will leave OPEC, dealing a blow to the group and its leader Saudi Arabia as the global oil industry grapples with the massive supply disruption caused by the Iran war , Bloomberg reported. Rystad Energy's head of geopolitical analysis, Jorge Leon, said in a statement that "Losing a member with 4.8 million barrels per day of capacity, and the ambition to produce more, takes a real tool out of the group's hands" .

First Tanker Breakthrough Offers Hope for Energy Flows

The Idemitsu Maru began sailing late Monday toward the strait from northwest of Abu Dhabi, where it had been sitting idle for more than a week, and followed a Tehran-approved northern route near the islands of Qeshm and Larak and successfully cleared the strait on Tuesday , according to tanker-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg.

The first oil and gas shipments are beginning to move through the Strait of Hormuz after weeks of disruption, with ship-tracking data showing that the LNG tanker Mubaraz has successfully exited the chokepoint, marking the first such transit since hostilities began , Gulf News reported. About 2,000 ships remain stranded in the Gulf, waiting to be allowed through , according to Al Jazeera.

The breakthrough comes as "We are facing the biggest energy security threat in history," Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, told CNBC on Thursday . The conflict has caused the restriction of nearly all traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, leading to what the International Energy Agency has characterised as the "largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market" .

OPEC Fractures Under Historic Supply Shock

The Iran war wiped out 7.88 million barrels per day of Opec's production in March, resulting in the biggest supply collapse for the producers' group in recent decades, with Opec production falling 27 per cent to 20.79 million bpd in March , The National reported.

The UAE has long been frustrated with its allotted quota for oil production as an OPEC member, and the small nation is one of the largest oil producers in OPEC, but its spare capacity is also unusually large, with leaving the cartel freeing the UAE up to produce more of that oil , NPR reported.

The UAE has long pushed for higher OPEC and OPEC+ production quotas as it sought to expand capacity well beyond the levels assigned to it by the cartel, with the quotas having capped the UAE's output to around 3.2 million barrels per day , according to CNN, citing Robin Mills, CEO of Qamar Energy.

Daniel Sternoff, a senior fellow with Columbia's Center on Global Energy Policy, said via email that "It's a break with one of Saudi Arabia's core priorities and comes as the UAE has felt the US, Israel France and other countries have proven to be better allies during this war than their neighbors" , Axios reported.

Qatar LNG Disruption Reshapes Global Gas Markets

Iranian attacks have knocked out 17% of Qatar's liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity, causing an estimated $20 billion in lost annual revenue and threatening supplies to Europe and Asia, with Saad al-Kaabi saying two of Qatar's 14 LNG trains and one of its two gas-to-liquids (GTL) facilities were damaged in the unprecedented strikes, and the repairs will sideline 12.8 million tons per year of LNG for three to five years , according to Reuters via CNBC.

Global LNG supply slumped by about 20%, with March production alone down 8% year on year, as the US-Iran conflict disrupts markets, with each month without LNG cargoes through the Strait of Hormuz removing around 10 bcm of supply, heavily impacting key importers in Asia , The National reported, citing the International Energy Agency.

The impact of the force majeure will be particularly acute for India, which relies on Qatar as its single largest LNG supplier, with pre-war import data from Kpler showing that in January 2026, India imported 2.58 million tonnes of LNG, of which 1.06 million tonnes came from Qatar, equal to 40.9 per cent of total imports , according to The National.

US Blockade Squeezes Iranian Oil Storage

The Trump administration believes that the two-week-old, semi-porous U.S. blockade of Iranian shipping will soon bring Tehran to its knees by forcing it to shut down oil wells as it runs out of storage space for crude it can no longer ship, with that looming production shutdown threatening Iran with permanent, severe damage to a major part of its economy , Foreign Policy reported.

Iranian crude exports, which averaged about 1.85 million barrels per day in March, have fallen to roughly 567,000 barrels per day in recent weeks, with loadings having plunged by approximately 70 percent since the blockade took effect, with no observed successful evasions of the restrictions around the Strait of Hormuz , according to analysis by commodity intelligence firm Kpler cited by Indrastra.

Kenneth Katzman, former Iran analyst at the Congressional Research Service in Washington, DC, said Iran is not exporting new oil amid the US blockade of Iranian ports, but Tehran has between 160 million and 170 million barrels of oil "afloat" on ships around the world currently, with those supplies waiting to be delivered, and based on those supplies, Tehran could have revenue flows that can last until August , Al Jazeera reported.

Market Impact and Path Forward

The Brent crude oil spot price averaged $103 per barrel in March, and the EIA expects it to peak in the second quarter of 2026 at $115/b before easing as production shut-ins slowly abate, with the agency maintaining a risk premium on crude oil prices throughout the forecast period and forecasting the Brent crude oil price will fall below $90/b in 4Q26 and average $76/b in 2027 , according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration's Short-Term Energy Outlook.

The United States has said it will take six months to clear mines it believes have been laid by Iran, and even if the strait reopens, shipping insurance could cost 20 times more than before the war, analysts say , Al Jazeera reported.

There is also almost no movement through the Strait of Hormuz, the vital bottleneck that's essentially cut off 20% of the world's oil and gas supply , PBS reported. The successful transit of the Idemitsu Maru and the Mubaraz LNG tanker may signal that major energy consumers are regaining confidence, but traffic in Hormuz is still far below normal, with every loaded tanker now becoming part of the risk calculation , according to Gulf News.

The UAE's departure from OPEC, combined with the first tentative tanker movements through Hormuz, marks a potential turning point in what has become the most severe energy crisis in modern history—though full recovery of Middle East energy flows remains months or years away.