On its third day of independence from OPEC, the UAE is clearly aiming to reach escape velocity

It’s day three of the New Oil Order, and [redacted]’s already getting interesting: OPEC+ pushed ahead yesterday with a 188k barrel per day increase in production for June…

…and ADNOC boss Sultan Al Jaber just unleashed a USD 55 bn oil and gas contract-award program through 2028 as the UAE looks to hit (and presumably blow past) its goal of 5 mn barrels of production per day by 2027.

Perhaps even more interesting: What ADNOC is billing as a “Local+” expansion of the in-country value program will pump bns of USD into the UAE economy over the next five years as it brings more Emirates-based companies into the energy industry supply chain. For a certain type of company, that’s a pretty big anchor against any tendency to declare some other city its “regional headquarters.”

The UAE’s push comes as the amateur Orientalists continue their tour of our region, saying Saudi’s pullback from gigaprojects “raises questions about its plans” and suggesting that the “Saudi mirage” is fading.

One of the smartest guys we know in MENA+ said he thought there was an outside chance that Iran’s attacks on the region could have been a watershed moment — that we could have seen the burying of the hatchet between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi and, with it, a new push on joint military procurement and defense strategy.

Hot Tub Time Machine: Instead, there’s a very real risk we may be sliding back into the 1980s and 1990s — when low oil prices were a cap on economies across the region. The UAE is clearly betting that it is so far down the diversification highway that if that’s the case, it’s better to go it alone and be the first to hit escape velocity. –Patrick