OPEC+ Adds 188,000 Barrels a Day as Hormuz Idles Millions More

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, collectively known as OPEC+, voted on Sunday to add 188,000 barrels a day to July oil output quotas, the fourth consecutive monthly production increase from the seven-nation group that now runs the cartel without the United Arab Emirates. The Strait of Hormuz has been largely closed since February 28, blocking the waterway that moves roughly one-fifth of global oil trade.

Bloomberg characterized Sunday’s move as “another modest symbolic increase,” noting that the blockage of Persian Gulf exports prevents most members from implementing the new target. The group has been voting to raise production for four straight months; the physical shipping infrastructure for those barrels has been operating under separate constraints entirely.

The Decision on Paper

The seven-nation group, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, met virtually on Sunday and agreed to raise collective output by 188,000 barrels a day in July, matching the identical figure approved for June at their May 3 meeting. Saudi Arabia and Russia will each add 62,000 barrels a day. The remaining 64,000 is split across five smaller members.

From April through July, the seven core members will have added roughly 788,000 barrels a day back into their production schedules, continuing an unwinding of voluntary cuts deepened through 2024 and 2025. OPEC+’s incremental output decisions through the second half of 2025 had already mapped that gradual trajectory, with the October 2025 increase running at just 137,000 barrels a day. Sunday’s statement confirmed flexibility to “increase, pause or reverse” the phase-out, extended the compensation deadline for over-producing members to December 2026, set the next meeting for July 5, and confirmed that roughly 5.86 million barrels a day in additional voluntary cuts remain on the books.

How Much the Strait Has Taken

Before and After February 28

Before the United States and Israel launched air strikes on Iran on February 28, roughly 3,000 vessels passed through the Strait of Hormuz each month, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence. Kpler, the energy analytics firm, measured crude oil and petroleum product exports through the waterway at approximately 15 million barrels a day, about one-fifth of all global seaborne oil trade. Japan sourced roughly 70% of its Middle Eastern crude through the strait; India, South Korea, and China depended on the same corridor for the bulk of their Persian Gulf imports.

By April, Kpler’s vessel-tracking data recorded just 191 vessels crossing in the entire month. Tanker traffic was running at roughly 5% of its pre-war average. More than 1,550 commercial ships sat stranded in and around the waterway by mid-May, with approximately 22,500 mariners still aboard, confirmed by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

• 15 million bpd in crude and oil products transited the Strait of Hormuz daily before the conflict, per Kpler vessel-tracking data
• 191 vessels crossed the strait in all of April, against roughly 3,000 each month before the war
• 10.1 million bpd global oil supply crash in March, per the World Bank’s April 2026 Commodity Markets Outlook
• 3.7 million bpd estimated Q2 2026 oil market deficit, partly offset by emergency strategic stockpile draws

The Downstream Cascade

The disruption ran past crude oil within days of the February 28 strikes. QatarEnergy declared force majeure on all liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipments on March 4 after Iranian attacks on its Ras Laffan industrial complex, the world’s largest LNG export facility. The Arabian Gulf accounts for roughly 46% of global urea trade, the primary feedstock for agricultural nitrogen fertilizers, and that supply line has been largely unavailable since the closure began.

Brent crude’s monthly gain through March was approximately 65%, its largest single-month rise on World Bank records, before a temporary April ceasefire brought prices down briefly. As of Friday’s close, Brent was trading at $108.17 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) at $101.94, both roughly 78% above their January 1 levels. Gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel climbed faster than crude itself as refinery shortfalls compounded the supply picture across import-dependent economies in Asia and Europe.

Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), described the Hormuz disruption as “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” The UN Trade and Development body’s analysis of Hormuz shipping disruption effects on global trade flagged higher energy, fertilizer, and transport costs as compounding inflation pressures on the most vulnerable import-dependent developing economies, consistent with knock-on effects observed during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war.

The Gap Between Quotas and Cargoes

The 188,000 barrels a day OPEC+ voted to add on Sunday is less than 2% of the 10.1 million that went offline in March. The full April-through-July unwinding totals 788,000 barrels a day, less than 8% of that same month’s supply crash.

Helima Croft, head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, told Bloomberg the group was “essentially talking about hypothetical future scenarios, with the bulk of those barrels stuck.” OPEC’s own monthly production data confirm it: member output fell by 1.22 million barrels a day in May, dropping collective OPEC production to 16.33 million barrels a day, a decline driven by the same bottleneck the quota vote was meant to address.

Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which together account for the largest share of Sunday’s paper increase at a combined 78,000 barrels a day, run primary export infrastructure inside the Persian Gulf. Their actual export volumes depend on what can transit the strait.

Consumer markets have already absorbed the shock. Japan and South Korea drew on strategic petroleum reserves as their Middle Eastern supply chains fractured. China reduced imports sharply. The World Bank’s April 2026 baseline assumed disruptions would ease by Q4 and Brent would average roughly $86 a barrel for the full year; at Friday’s close, Brent was trading more than $22 above that projection. Global oil consumption fell by an estimated 0.8 million barrels a day year-on-year in March as demand destruction set in across major economies.

After the UAE Left the Table

Abu Dhabi’s Exit and the Fujairah Pipeline

The United Arab Emirates exited OPEC+ on May 1, ending nearly six decades of membership. Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) had a maximum sustainable production capacity of 4.85 million barrels a day at the time of exit, against a quota of just under 3.5 million. That gap of at least 1.35 million barrels a day had been Abu Dhabi’s central frustration since 2021, with the war accelerating the timeline for departure.

Free of quota constraints, the UAE plans to expand toward 5 million barrels a day by 2027 without coordinating output levels with Riyadh. The Middle East Institute’s analysis of the UAE’s OPEC+ exit noted Abu Dhabi was “obliged to keep a greater share of its available capacity unused than any other OPEC+ member,” a structural frustration the group’s quota architecture could not resolve.

The short-run bypass relief is real but constrained. The Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline (ADCOP) runs from the inland Habshan complex to the port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, bypassing Hormuz entirely. The UAE exported roughly 1.7 million barrels a day via Fujairah last year. That pipeline is already running close to its full rated capacity, so meaningful additional throughput requires either the strait to reopen or significant new Fujairah terminal investment to come online.

Kazakhstan, Iraq, and a Long Overdue Bill

Compliance problems inside the remaining seven members predated the war and remained unresolved when Sunday’s meeting began. Kazakhstan, which participates in OPEC+ as a non-OPEC member, carried compensation obligations as high as 669,000 barrels a day over its assigned target, driven by the Chevron-led Tengiz field expansion pushing output well above its agreed ceiling. Kazakhstan’s energy minister acknowledged publicly in 2025 that the country “cannot yet fit into those compensation schedules.”

• Kazakhstan’s overproduction peaked at 669,000 barrels a day above quota, the largest excess in the group, stemming from Tengiz expansion output growth
• Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer after Saudi Arabia, carried monthly compensation obligations of between 79,000 and 140,000 barrels a day, per plans filed with the OPEC Secretariat in Vienna
• Six OPEC+ members collectively overproduced by a cumulative 4.779 million barrels a day since January 2024, per OPEC filing data, before the war displaced the normal compensation accounting

Sunday’s communiqué extended the compensation window to December 2026. The UAE’s exit separately removed roughly 12% of core OPEC output from the quota framework, shrinking a group that now controls about 33% of global supply, down from roughly half at its founding.

Tehran’s Proposal and Why Oil Prices Moved

Brent fell close to 2% and WTI dropped about 3% on Friday after Iran submitted an updated peace proposal to Pakistan, the primary mediator between Washington and Tehran throughout the conflict. Trump said on Saturday he had received word about “the concept of a deal” and was waiting for exact wording; he had declared as recently as May 23 that an agreement was “largely negotiated” and would be announced shortly, a claim Iranian state media disputed.

The negotiation has moved in fits and starts since April 8, when Pakistan brokered a ceasefire. Direct US-Iran talks convened in Islamabad on April 11, the highest-level engagement between the two countries since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, but failed after 21 hours when Vice President JD Vance announced that Iran had refused “to accept our terms.” Iran briefly announced the strait open on April 17 during a Lebanon truce, then reclosed it the next day after the U.S. maintained its counter-blockade targeting ships entering and leaving Iranian ports. The U.S. ended that counter-blockade on May 29; a U.S. airstrike on Iranian military targets followed on June 1.

A full settlement is the single variable that changes supply at the scale the market can feel. The Hormuz corridor at pre-war volumes moved roughly four times more oil daily than all quota increases OPEC+ has approved since April combined. Restoring normal commercial transit would gradually release the 1,550 stranded commercial vessels back into the global shipping network and eventually restart Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Qatari energy exports to Asia and Europe. No quota adjustment voted from Vienna or Riyadh accomplishes any of those things.

Before the group reconvenes on July 5, the Iran negotiation will have answered whether any of those barrels move at all.