Larry Johnson: Simply Put, Karl Miller Was Right About the UAE
by Larry Johnson [11-2-2026] Larry C. Johnson(bio).
On October 25 I published “Record Oil, Empty Tanks: The UAE’s Miracle Recovery,” built on Karl Miller’s October 22 assessment of the Emirates’ oil and gas system. The argument was not complicated. The UAE had rebuilt its ability to pump and ship crude, and good for them. What it had not rebuilt was its safety margin: the product stocks, the gas chain, the bypass capacity around Hormuz. Record oil, empty tanks. It fit in a headline.
That same afternoon I received a note from Philip Robinson, ADNOC’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications. My article, he wrote, contained “a number of inaccuracies” and painted a misleading picture of the UAE’s energy resilience. He asked me to correct it or take it down.
Which inaccuracies? He didn’t say. That is a novel approach to fact-checking. It is like calling the fire department to report a blaze and declining to give the address.
An open invitation, still open
I am an accommodating fellow. I offered Mr. Robinson space on this site to publish ADNOC’s rebuttal. Then, to save him the trouble of figuring out what a rebuttal might contain, I sent him a ten-point data request. I asked ADNOC to identify each disputed passage and supply the correction. I asked for the current serviceable capacity at Habshan, Shah, Ruwais and Fujairah, separating what has been repaired from what is still broken. I asked for a matched 30-day balance of production, deliveries and stocks. I asked for inventories by product and location. And I asked what, operationally, ADNOC means by the word “resilient.” I even promised to publish whatever numbers we could validate.
The response has been total, perfect silence. Perhaps the data is stored in Fujairah, in which case I understand the delay. There isn’t much in Fujairah.
Enter the boss
Then today, November 2, Sultan Al Jaber, ADNOC’s Managing Director and Group CEO, walked onto the stage to open ADIPEC in Abu Dhabi and delivered Karl Miller’s thesis with better lighting and a bigger audience.
According to Dr. Al Jaber, nearly one billion barrels have been drawn from global inventories since shipping through Hormuz was disrupted. Diesel stocks in some markets are at their lowest seasonal level in 35 years. Some markets face a 600 billion cubic foot LNG supply gap. Shipping and logistics, which used to account for less than 5 percent of the cost of a barrel, now eat more than 30 percent. Brent sits around $110.
His summary: “Simply put, the world has eroded its supply buffers.”
His prescription: expanded strategic storage, larger stockpiles of refined products, flexible refining capacity closer to consumers. And, the line I want framed and mailed to ADNOC’s communications department, securing production is no longer enough to guarantee that supply actually reaches the customer.
Read that again. Production is not security. Stocks and routes are. That is not a rebuttal of my October 25 article. That is a summary of it.
He’s been saying it since May
This is not even a new conversion. Back in May, speaking to the Atlantic Council, Al Jaber said energy security “is no longer about your ability to continue to produce.” It is about routes, storage and redundancy, he explained, and too much of the world’s energy moves through too few chokepoints.
So the CEO of ADNOC has spent six months telling the world that pumping oil is not the same as being secure. The moment someone applied that exact standard to the UAE, his communications chief declared it inaccurate. One of them didn’t get the memo. I suspect it wasn’t the CEO.
In fairness, which is more than I received
Karl Miller insists on being fair, so I will be too. Al Jaber spoke about the world, not about the UAE. He did not stand up at ADIPEC and announce that Fujairah’s product stocks had fallen to roughly 7 million barrels from about 20 million before the war. He did not mention that the ADCOP pipeline to Fujairah moves 1.5 to 1.8 million barrels a day against a claimed national production capacity of 4.85 million, and that the second pipeline remains under construction. He did not say that ADNOC Gas utilization collapsed in the second quarter while its plants were technically “available.”
He didn’t have to. The UAE is located in the world, last time I checked. Every buffer Al Jaber now says the world has eroded (accessible stocks, product inventories, alternative routes, spare refining) is precisely where Miller found the UAE running thin. If the global system’s cushion is gone, the country sitting at the chokepoint, with its storage hub inside Iranian missile range and drawn down to a fraction of its prewar level, is not the exception. It is the case study.
The offer stands
Mr. Robinson, my phone number has not changed, and neither has my offer. Send me ADNOC’s 30-day production, delivery and stock balance. Send me serviceable capacity at Habshan, Shah, Ruwais and Fujairah. If the tanks are full and Miller is wrong, I will publish it and say so, prominently.
Until then, I’m going to take your boss’s word for it. He seems to know what he’s talking about.