The risk of a price war after the Middle East conflict

Alexey Belogoryev, Research and Development Director of the Institute for Energy and Finance, commented to TASS on the reasons and consequences of the UAE's withdrawal from OPEC and OPEC+.

Alexey Belogoryev called the fundamental reason for the UAE's withdrawal the aggravated contradiction between the countries' need for production growth and tight restrictions within OPEC+.

"The UAE, Iraq, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia are faced with an acute contradiction between the need to increase their own production in order to return on investments already made and the tight restrictions within OPEC+. Saudi Arabia, as the leader of the association, restrained its ambitions, but the other three began to systematically violate discipline and insist on a significant increase in their quotas," he said.

Belogoryev recalled that it was planned to mitigate the conflict by revising the baseline production level based on an independent audit, which is being conducted in 2026.

"But conceived to extinguish the fire, this idea, apparently, only added fuel to it. First, in December 2023, Angola withdrew from OPEC, unhappy that its base level was being revised down. And now the UAE is leaving for exactly the opposite reason - having failed to achieve an increase in the base level to the target value of 5 million barrels per day," the expert said.

The UAE's current production, as of February 2026, is 3.5 million barrels per day. At the same time, Belogoryev believes that the OPEC+ agreement will continue to operate as long as the tacit partnership between Saudi Arabia and Russia remains.

"As long as their positions more or less coincide, the agreement will continue to operate," he concluded.