Huge UAE Oilfield Could Hike Capacity to 1.5 Million Bpd Earlier than Planned

The giant Upper Zakum oilfield in the UAE could achieve its 2030 target to boost production capacity to 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd) from 1 million bpd earlier than planned, the CEO of co-venturer ExxonMobil said.

“The team is working hard to drive production up,” Exxon’s chief executive Darren Woods told Bloomberg in an interview in Abu Dhabi.

“We’ve got an objective that we set by 2030, but I think we can do better than that,” the top executive of the U.S. supermajor said.

ExxonMobil became a partner in Upper Zakum, the world’s second-largest offshore oilfield, in 2006. The field is operated by ADNOC Offshore on behalf of its shareholders, ADNOC, ExxonMobil, and JODCO.

Earlier this year, during the visit of U.S. President Donald Trump in the UAE, Exxon and Abu Dhabi’s ADNOC signed an agreement to expand the capacity of the Upper Zakum field, without giving details on production capacity. In the Bloomberg interview on Monday, Exxon’s Woods revealed the plans to have the capacity jump to 1.5 million bpd, up from 1 million bpd now.

The capacity expansion is in line with ADNOC’s goal to boost its production capacity to 5 million bpd by 2027. Some indications point to the company reaching that target earlier, possibly in 2026.

The UAE’s current production capacity is about 4.8 million bpd, although it currently produces around 3.4 million bpd, due to the OPEC+ agreements and quotas.

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However, the UAE, one of the top OPEC producers, has successfully argued that it is entitled to a higher quota within the OPEC+ deal as it is expanding its production capacity. OPEC raised this year the baseline against which it calculates the quota for the UAE in the OPEC+ agreement.

On Sunday, the OPEC+ producers, including the UAE, decided to pause their reversal of the production cuts in the first quarter of 2026, after a small increase in December. Citing “seasonality” and historically weaker demand in the first quarter of any year, OPEC said it would halt the production increases in January, February, and March.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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