What’s behind Qatar’s Decision to Leave OPEC?
While the primary reason for Qatar’s choice to leave the cartel is its goal to become the world leader in the natural gas market, there is also a geopolitical reason underlying the Emirate’s decision. Analysis by Prof. Giancarlo Elia Valori
Giancarlo Elia Valori
| 19/12/2018
Qatar's emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani (Photo: AP)
The Emirate of Qatar will leave OPEC as from January 1, 2019.
The primary reason for this choice is the Emirate’s project to become the world leader in the natural gas market, raising its production from 77 million tons per year to 110 million tons. However, there is obviously also a geopolitical and energy reason underlying Qatar’s current choice.
This is the Emirate’s final response to the boycott and blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia on Qatar in June 2017, with the support of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Yemen, Maldives, the Libyan GNA, Egypt, and Jordan – based on Saudi Arabia’s generic accusation whereby Qatar was supposed to sponsor and support "terrorism" on its own.
The blockade was imposed two days after President Trump had met as many as 55 Heads of Arab and Muslim countries to build a sort of NATO equivalent, always against "terrorism" – an alliance to be set up immediately to counteract, above all, the Shi’ite and Iranian danger.
Let us leave aside the twenty-eight pages taken from the report of the US Senate on September 11, which would definitively prove the connection between those Al-Qaeda operatives and the Saudi regime – as well as the many multiannual reports of private and public funding to the jihadists and finally the lines of credit opened again by eminent citizens of the Wahhabi Kingdom in favor of Al Baghdadi’s Syrian-Iraqi Caliphate.
The Saudis, however, are too rich not to be believed, especially by the USA – hence the great blockade on Qatar succeeded also with the support of some Western countries.
For the whole Middle East, their troops, like the US ones, reported to CENTCOM, at the Al Udeid base having its headquarters precisely in Qatar.
The strategic characteristics of Qatar, which today wants to build its autonomous natural gas organization – independent of the oil one of OPEC, which does not deal with gas and is, however, dominated by Saudi Arabia – are many and particularly interesting
Firstly, the Qatari people are probably the richest citizens in the world. If we assume that the Americans’ average income is 100, that of Qatari citizens is 187.4.
Just about the size of the Falkland Islands, the Emirate has 1.9 million residents, with a very high and growing share of immigrants. From 2000 to 2010 the Emirate’s economy grew by a 12.9% average per year. Its future growth up to 2022 is expected to be 18% higher than the current one.
There is also an interesting geopolitical sign: Qatar participated – with great commitment – in the Western operations against Gaddafi by supporting, in particular, the black market of Cyrenaica’s oil, together with the Turkish intelligence services.
Nevertheless, Qatar also supports some "rebel" jihadist Syrian groups against Assad, thus doing half a favor to US allies – while hosting, since 2013, a political office of the Afghan Taliban, which is well known and also frequented by the US intelligence service operatives.
Qatar's global industrial and financial investments, however, are manifold.
Through its sovereign fund, the Emirate owns significant shareholdings of the Agricultural Bank of China – and certainly the Qatari decision to leave OPEC has been blessed by China. It also has shareholding in the Airbus Group; the London Stock Exchange (15.1%); Volkswagen (17%); Lagardère, a large and diversified media and publishing company; the Paris St. Germain football club; the Virgin megastore; the HBSC, one of the largest banking groups in the world; Credit Suisse (5.2%) and Veolia, a French water and gas utility and service company.
Not to mention the countless real estate operations: Porta Nuova in Milan; Westin Excelsior in Rome; Gallia in Milan; Costa Smeralda in Sardinia; Deutsche Bank; Barclay's; Royal Dutch Shell; Tiffany; Siemens; the Heathrow airport; Walt Disney and the Empire State Building, as well as many other shareholdings not mentioned in this paper.
However, it also has a 3% shareholding of Total, which for Italy is an extremely important sign; a majority shareholding of the Miramax entertainment and movie company, as well as shareholdings in Rosnet, the Russian giant of natural gas and raw materials, and in the big five-year project for liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in Germany and in the EU – a $30 billion project, of which 10 invested for Germany alone.
Therefore, between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, in the fight between oil producers and natural gas extractors, there is a real war for the hegemonic conquest of technologically advanced areas and of Europe, in particular, with a view to definitely acquiring markets and using their diversification opportunities.
Moreover, Qatar is at least as rich in natural gas as Iran (and, together with the Shi’ite Republic, it participates in the exploitation of the South Pars II marine field), but also as the Russian Federation.
The new Qatar-centered "gas OPEC" means, therefore, that there is no longer the US-friendly Sunni oil OPEC, precisely the one that organized the great petrodollar recycling started after Egypt and Syria’s Yom Kippur war against Israel in 1973.
Oil recycling at a "high" price against the US dollar, which, after the end of the Bretton Woods agreements, led to the new hegemony of the US currency and its inappropriate exchange rate, despite its internal fundamentals.
"The dollar is our currency, but it is your problem," FED Governor Paul Volcker said to his fellow Governors of the European Central Banks.
At that time, there was not yet the weak and irresolute timidity of the Euro to make the picture more complex.
The European currency is not a lender of last resort, but it plays the game of the global currency as an alternative to the US dollar, with the operational results we can imagine.
It is therefore no mere coincidence that the only strategic uses of the Euro were the minimum Iranian ones, in the oil Stock Exchanges of the islands in the Persian Gulf, or the more paraded than real ones by Saddam Hussein.
In essence, reverting to the geopolitical sense of the very recent Qatari decision to leave OPEC, this means that the 600,000 barrels/day of oil extracted from Qatar are considered fully marginal by it and certainly can never compete with Saudi Arabia’s 11 million barrels/day of Saudi Arabia.
Qatar plays the game with its natural gas – it does not play its oil cards.
The current Qatari operation, however, implies a strategic choice in the near future, which could be the creation of a "gas OPEC" with Russia and Iran, in view of a doubling of the LPG prices in 2019, with China becoming the world's top LPG consumer and the USA the world's top oil extractor, albeit with the new and expensive shale techniques, which generate profits only with high oil barrel prices.
Or an economic and financial alliance between Qatar, China, Japan, and Russia, which could marginalize the dollar area by reducing it to oil.
At a geopolitical level, this will certainly mean greater instability – not necessarily fully peaceful – between the Emirate and the Saudi Kingdom, while the former will invest – also within the EU – in the industrial processing of LPG, which mainly regards plastics, resins, and all synthetic products from hydrocarbons.
If Russia – which also plays on the Saudi table – will be able to control its oil production, in line with the Sunni OPEC, the Qatari operation will be successful, but only for the creation of the new LPG market, and Qatar will not affect the positions already reached by Saudi Arabia and its allies.
Conversely, if Russia and Iran increase oil production, the pro-Saudi OPEC will definitely collapse and the African, Indonesian, and South American production areas shall look for other regional cartels and, hence, for other geopolitical axes.
Furthermore, the bilateral relationship between the USA and Saudi Arabia will be put to an end, given the new US production and oil power, its global exporting capacity and, finally, its autonomy from the Middle East political and financial cycles.
Moreover, according to the Emir’s policy lines, the Qatari economy is focused on attracting and accumulating foreign investments, especially after the 2017 blockade, which has attracted much capital from Asia and the Middle East itself, in addition to the opening of new ports and the creation of new Special Economic Zones.
Both Saudi Arabia and Qatar have used the so-called Arab "springs" to broaden their personal power and create strong competition among the Gulf countries.
Moreover, Qatar has used the phase following the Arab "springs" to redefine its traditional expansion axes: the special relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood and its traditional link with Iran.
The Emirate, in fact, believes that the Muslim Brotherhood is the central axis of Arab politics and, hence, intends to support it.
While all the others repress it, in line with Saudi Arabia.
Even after the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt – with the coup organized by El-Sisi in 2013 against Mohammed Morsi – Qatar keeps on supporting the fraternal Ikhwan or also Hamas and all the other organizations that have integrated into the global network of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Saudi tension with Qatar also results from the Qatari geo-economic link with Iran and, above all, from Iran’s economic growth after the 2014 JCPOA agreements on the Iranian nuclear capacity. Saudi Arabia wants to avoid said agreements leading to the economic, oil and military recovery of Shi’ite Iran.
Furthermore, it cannot be ruled out that, in the near future, Saudi Arabia – possibly supported by the USA, which now believes in every "counterterrorist" storytelling – even organizes a coup against Al-Thani and the current Qatari ruling elite.
The sequence of attempted and failed coups is already long.
It would be a geopolitical suicide, but it may happen.
Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other countries are now dependent on the remittances sent from Qatar by their fellow citizens to their homeland, even if, as countries, they sided with Saudi Arabia during the blockade imposed on Qatar in 2017.
Since the beginning, however, Tunisia refused to condemn Qatar (and Italy should be more careful to these infra-Islamic shifts), while Turkey – which operated with Qatar during the Libyan jihadist uprising – does not accept the Saudi diktat. The same obviously holds true for Iran and - probably less intuitively – for Oman.
After an ambiguous phase, even the Russian Federation – which had not well foreseen the internal conflict on Qatar within the Gulf Security Council in 2017 – has gradually linked itself to the Emirate, even without questioning its ties with Saudi Arabia.
Moreover, the United States has even discovered it still has a large military base in Qatar and hence cannot afford a worsening of the infra-Arab conflict and, above all, of the infra-Wahhabi conflict between Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Obviously the issue of relations between Qatar and "terrorism," or the link between Qatar and Iran, is a completely uncertain and widely manipulated issue.
The Emir’s speech that expressed support for Iran and Hamas and criticized the other governments of the region – a speech that allegedly was to be held on May 23, 2017 – was never delivered. There had been announcements widely publicized by the Saudi and Emirates’ news agencies, but the Emir’ speech had never been delivered.
In this regard, Qatar’s official news agency in Doha talked about the hacking of Qatari websites, but not even this is certain.
There is also the issue of the one billion US dollars paid as a ransom to "bandits" in Iraq by some members of the Emir's family.
It is ascertained that part of that money arrived at the Syrian Al-Qaeda "section," Jabhat Tahrir al-Sham, with a share of funds that – not too strangely – later reached the Iranian government.
Certainly there is also the already-mentioned support for the Muslim Brotherhood and there are now ascertained links between the Ikhwan and some Iranian financial and political-military networks.
Everything is possible in the Middle East.
In Doha there is also a "historical" office of the Palestinians and also one of Hamas, which has always been an integral part of the Muslim Brotherhood, while it is certain that large amounts of money were sent by Qatar to the Egyptian Brotherhood during Morsi’s government and that the Ikhwan militias from every part of the Middle East were trained in Qatar.
Obviously, at least initially, the guerrilla warfare in Libya after Gaddafi’s fall was a clash between the forces supported by the Qatari intelligence services and those organized by the other Emirates, with a specific role played by Turkey – a loyal ally of Qatar – above all at an economic level.
Westerners’ stupidity did the rest.
Moreover, Qatar also sent its troops so that the Sunnis could regain control in Bahrain during the 2011 Shi’ite uprising.
Nor should we forget that, apart from the Al Udeid US base in Qatar, Turkey itself is building its base in Qatar for as many as 5,000 soldiers – a base located in Tariq bin Ziyad, south of the capital city.
However, how does the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – the instrument of confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Qatar – work?
Is it not affected – like OPEC – by an internal weakness that blocks it for any relevant decision?
The GCC was founded in 1981. However, the monetary union, which has been gradually abandoned by Oman and the Emirates, has never been reached.
And the GCC still regards Iran as an "imperialist" factor of radical destabilization of the Arabian Peninsula, especially with the organization of Shi’ites in Saudi Arabia and in other areas of the Emirates.
The Shi’ites within the Saudi regime account for 15-20%, especially in the major oil extraction areas. Obviously, the Saudi regime does not want to destabilize these areas and, above all, it does not want to break the link between the USA and the Sunni world of the Arabian Peninsula – a break that, in the near future, would lead to the victory of the Iranian Shi’ites.
While the primary reason for Qatar’s choice to leave the cartel is its goal to become the world leader in the natural gas market, there is also a geopolitical reason underlying the Emirate’s decision. Analysis by Prof. Giancarlo Elia Valori
Qatar's emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani (Photo: AP)
The Emirate of Qatar will leave OPEC as from January 1, 2019.
The primary reason for this choice is the Emirate’s project to become the world leader in the natural gas market, raising its production from 77 million tons per year to 110 million tons. However, there is obviously also a geopolitical and energy reason underlying Qatar’s current choice.
This is the Emirate’s final response to the boycott and blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia on Qatar in June 2017, with the support of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Yemen, Maldives, the Libyan GNA, Egypt, and Jordan – based on Saudi Arabia’s generic accusation whereby Qatar was supposed to sponsor and support "terrorism" on its own.
The blockade was imposed two days after President Trump had met as many as 55 Heads of Arab and Muslim countries to build a sort of NATO equivalent, always against "terrorism" – an alliance to be set up immediately to counteract, above all, the Shi’ite and Iranian danger.
Let us leave aside the twenty-eight pages taken from the report of the US Senate on September 11, which would definitively prove the connection between those Al-Qaeda operatives and the Saudi regime – as well as the many multiannual reports of private and public funding to the jihadists and finally the lines of credit opened again by eminent citizens of the Wahhabi Kingdom in favor of Al Baghdadi’s Syrian-Iraqi Caliphate.
The Saudis, however, are too rich not to be believed, especially by the USA – hence the great blockade on Qatar succeeded also with the support of some Western countries.
For the whole Middle East, their troops, like the US ones, reported to CENTCOM, at the Al Udeid base having its headquarters precisely in Qatar.
The strategic characteristics of Qatar, which today wants to build its autonomous natural gas organization – independent of the oil one of OPEC, which does not deal with gas and is, however, dominated by Saudi Arabia – are many and particularly interesting
Firstly, the Qatari people are probably the richest citizens in the world. If we assume that the Americans’ average income is 100, that of Qatari citizens is 187.4.
Just about the size of the Falkland Islands, the Emirate has 1.9 million residents, with a very high and growing share of immigrants. From 2000 to 2010 the Emirate’s economy grew by a 12.9% average per year. Its future growth up to 2022 is expected to be 18% higher than the current one.
There is also an interesting geopolitical sign: Qatar participated – with great commitment – in the Western operations against Gaddafi by supporting, in particular, the black market of Cyrenaica’s oil, together with the Turkish intelligence services.
Nevertheless, Qatar also supports some "rebel" jihadist Syrian groups against Assad, thus doing half a favor to US allies – while hosting, since 2013, a political office of the Afghan Taliban, which is well known and also frequented by the US intelligence service operatives.
Qatar's global industrial and financial investments, however, are manifold.
Through its sovereign fund, the Emirate owns significant shareholdings of the Agricultural Bank of China – and certainly the Qatari decision to leave OPEC has been blessed by China. It also has shareholding in the Airbus Group; the London Stock Exchange (15.1%); Volkswagen (17%); Lagardère, a large and diversified media and publishing company; the Paris St. Germain football club; the Virgin megastore; the HBSC, one of the largest banking groups in the world; Credit Suisse (5.2%) and Veolia, a French water and gas utility and service company.
Not to mention the countless real estate operations: Porta Nuova in Milan; Westin Excelsior in Rome; Gallia in Milan; Costa Smeralda in Sardinia; Deutsche Bank; Barclay's; Royal Dutch Shell; Tiffany; Siemens; the Heathrow airport; Walt Disney and the Empire State Building, as well as many other shareholdings not mentioned in this paper.
However, it also has a 3% shareholding of Total, which for Italy is an extremely important sign; a majority shareholding of the Miramax entertainment and movie company, as well as shareholdings in Rosnet, the Russian giant of natural gas and raw materials, and in the big five-year project for liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in Germany and in the EU – a $30 billion project, of which 10 invested for Germany alone.
Therefore, between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, in the fight between oil producers and natural gas extractors, there is a real war for the hegemonic conquest of technologically advanced areas and of Europe, in particular, with a view to definitely acquiring markets and using their diversification opportunities.
Moreover, Qatar is at least as rich in natural gas as Iran (and, together with the Shi’ite Republic, it participates in the exploitation of the South Pars II marine field), but also as the Russian Federation.
The new Qatar-centered "gas OPEC" means, therefore, that there is no longer the US-friendly Sunni oil OPEC, precisely the one that organized the great petrodollar recycling started after Egypt and Syria’s Yom Kippur war against Israel in 1973.
Oil recycling at a "high" price against the US dollar, which, after the end of the Bretton Woods agreements, led to the new hegemony of the US currency and its inappropriate exchange rate, despite its internal fundamentals.
"The dollar is our currency, but it is your problem," FED Governor Paul Volcker said to his fellow Governors of the European Central Banks.
At that time, there was not yet the weak and irresolute timidity of the Euro to make the picture more complex.
The European currency is not a lender of last resort, but it plays the game of the global currency as an alternative to the US dollar, with the operational results we can imagine.
It is therefore no mere coincidence that the only strategic uses of the Euro were the minimum Iranian ones, in the oil Stock Exchanges of the islands in the Persian Gulf, or the more paraded than real ones by Saddam Hussein.
In essence, reverting to the geopolitical sense of the very recent Qatari decision to leave OPEC, this means that the 600,000 barrels/day of oil extracted from Qatar are considered fully marginal by it and certainly can never compete with Saudi Arabia’s 11 million barrels/day of Saudi Arabia.
Qatar plays the game with its natural gas – it does not play its oil cards.
The current Qatari operation, however, implies a strategic choice in the near future, which could be the creation of a "gas OPEC" with Russia and Iran, in view of a doubling of the LPG prices in 2019, with China becoming the world's top LPG consumer and the USA the world's top oil extractor, albeit with the new and expensive shale techniques, which generate profits only with high oil barrel prices.
Or an economic and financial alliance between Qatar, China, Japan, and Russia, which could marginalize the dollar area by reducing it to oil.
At a geopolitical level, this will certainly mean greater instability – not necessarily fully peaceful – between the Emirate and the Saudi Kingdom, while the former will invest – also within the EU – in the industrial processing of LPG, which mainly regards plastics, resins, and all synthetic products from hydrocarbons.
If Russia – which also plays on the Saudi table – will be able to control its oil production, in line with the Sunni OPEC, the Qatari operation will be successful, but only for the creation of the new LPG market, and Qatar will not affect the positions already reached by Saudi Arabia and its allies.
Conversely, if Russia and Iran increase oil production, the pro-Saudi OPEC will definitely collapse and the African, Indonesian, and South American production areas shall look for other regional cartels and, hence, for other geopolitical axes.
Furthermore, the bilateral relationship between the USA and Saudi Arabia will be put to an end, given the new US production and oil power, its global exporting capacity and, finally, its autonomy from the Middle East political and financial cycles.
Moreover, according to the Emir’s policy lines, the Qatari economy is focused on attracting and accumulating foreign investments, especially after the 2017 blockade, which has attracted much capital from Asia and the Middle East itself, in addition to the opening of new ports and the creation of new Special Economic Zones.
Both Saudi Arabia and Qatar have used the so-called Arab "springs" to broaden their personal power and create strong competition among the Gulf countries.
Moreover, Qatar has used the phase following the Arab "springs" to redefine its traditional expansion axes: the special relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood and its traditional link with Iran.
The Emirate, in fact, believes that the Muslim Brotherhood is the central axis of Arab politics and, hence, intends to support it.
While all the others repress it, in line with Saudi Arabia.
Even after the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt – with the coup organized by El-Sisi in 2013 against Mohammed Morsi – Qatar keeps on supporting the fraternal Ikhwan or also Hamas and all the other organizations that have integrated into the global network of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Saudi tension with Qatar also results from the Qatari geo-economic link with Iran and, above all, from Iran’s economic growth after the 2014 JCPOA agreements on the Iranian nuclear capacity. Saudi Arabia wants to avoid said agreements leading to the economic, oil and military recovery of Shi’ite Iran.
Furthermore, it cannot be ruled out that, in the near future, Saudi Arabia – possibly supported by the USA, which now believes in every "counterterrorist" storytelling – even organizes a coup against Al-Thani and the current Qatari ruling elite.
The sequence of attempted and failed coups is already long.
It would be a geopolitical suicide, but it may happen.
Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other countries are now dependent on the remittances sent from Qatar by their fellow citizens to their homeland, even if, as countries, they sided with Saudi Arabia during the blockade imposed on Qatar in 2017.
Since the beginning, however, Tunisia refused to condemn Qatar (and Italy should be more careful to these infra-Islamic shifts), while Turkey – which operated with Qatar during the Libyan jihadist uprising – does not accept the Saudi diktat. The same obviously holds true for Iran and - probably less intuitively – for Oman.
After an ambiguous phase, even the Russian Federation – which had not well foreseen the internal conflict on Qatar within the Gulf Security Council in 2017 – has gradually linked itself to the Emirate, even without questioning its ties with Saudi Arabia.
Moreover, the United States has even discovered it still has a large military base in Qatar and hence cannot afford a worsening of the infra-Arab conflict and, above all, of the infra-Wahhabi conflict between Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Obviously the issue of relations between Qatar and "terrorism," or the link between Qatar and Iran, is a completely uncertain and widely manipulated issue.
The Emir’s speech that expressed support for Iran and Hamas and criticized the other governments of the region – a speech that allegedly was to be held on May 23, 2017 – was never delivered. There had been announcements widely publicized by the Saudi and Emirates’ news agencies, but the Emir’ speech had never been delivered.
In this regard, Qatar’s official news agency in Doha talked about the hacking of Qatari websites, but not even this is certain.
There is also the issue of the one billion US dollars paid as a ransom to "bandits" in Iraq by some members of the Emir's family.
It is ascertained that part of that money arrived at the Syrian Al-Qaeda "section," Jabhat Tahrir al-Sham, with a share of funds that – not too strangely – later reached the Iranian government.
Certainly there is also the already-mentioned support for the Muslim Brotherhood and there are now ascertained links between the Ikhwan and some Iranian financial and political-military networks.
Everything is possible in the Middle East.
In Doha there is also a "historical" office of the Palestinians and also one of Hamas, which has always been an integral part of the Muslim Brotherhood, while it is certain that large amounts of money were sent by Qatar to the Egyptian Brotherhood during Morsi’s government and that the Ikhwan militias from every part of the Middle East were trained in Qatar.
Obviously, at least initially, the guerrilla warfare in Libya after Gaddafi’s fall was a clash between the forces supported by the Qatari intelligence services and those organized by the other Emirates, with a specific role played by Turkey – a loyal ally of Qatar – above all at an economic level.
Westerners’ stupidity did the rest.
Moreover, Qatar also sent its troops so that the Sunnis could regain control in Bahrain during the 2011 Shi’ite uprising.
Nor should we forget that, apart from the Al Udeid US base in Qatar, Turkey itself is building its base in Qatar for as many as 5,000 soldiers – a base located in Tariq bin Ziyad, south of the capital city.
However, how does the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – the instrument of confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Qatar – work?
Is it not affected – like OPEC – by an internal weakness that blocks it for any relevant decision?
The GCC was founded in 1981. However, the monetary union, which has been gradually abandoned by Oman and the Emirates, has never been reached.
And the GCC still regards Iran as an "imperialist" factor of radical destabilization of the Arabian Peninsula, especially with the organization of Shi’ites in Saudi Arabia and in other areas of the Emirates.
The Shi’ites within the Saudi regime account for 15-20%, especially in the major oil extraction areas. Obviously, the Saudi regime does not want to destabilize these areas and, above all, it does not want to break the link between the USA and the Sunni world of the Arabian Peninsula – a break that, in the near future, would lead to the victory of the Iranian Shi’ites.
