UAE wants to supply more oil than its OPEC quota and that could help push down prices once the Strait of Hormuz opens.

As the United Arab Emirates’s exit from OPEC officially takes effect, experts say the United States government will welcome the move for its potential to curb the oil-producing cartel’s pricing power.

While the UAE’s withdrawal, which went into effect on Friday, has been long rumoured, the timing was unexpected.

“The exit was a surprise in timing (at least to me), but in some ways has been brewing for some time,” wrote Rachel Ziemba, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security – a US think tank.

“It prompts the question whether there will be more competition than cooperation in the region and what the governance of the energy markets will look like.”

The UAE has publicly complained about OPEC quotas, which limit the oil production for all member countries. It is one of the few OPEC members that has invested in boosting production over the past few years, but has not been able to get it to market in the volumes it wanted.

The move also comes at a time when the world is clamouring for new supplies of oil. The Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas transits, mostly from Middle East nations to Asia and Europe, continues to be blocked amid the US-Israel war on Iran, sending oil prices soaring.

With oil demand shooting up, the UAE is ready to step in with higher supplies and lower prices.

“This is going to increase oil production once things normalise [in the strait] by about 2 million barrels per day, which will pull down some pricing pressure depending on how demand does compared to global prices,” Adnan Mazarei, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) – a non-partisan think tank in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera.

“The US would welcome a weakening of the OPEC and OPEC+. They do have some ability to set prices, and a decline in that power will be welcomed by the US,” Mazarei said.