As soon as we hit $100/kWh in the next year or two, that oil is worthless [1] (Tesla will supposedly hit this target when the Gigafactory is at full capacity).
There are other uses for oil besides gasoline that are not going to be displaced anytime soon. Jet fuel, home heating(could be if solar gets exceptionally cheap, but unlikely anytime soon), asphalt, plastics, etc. Those uses alone probably can't support oil at even its current depressed prices, but it will hardly be worthless for decades to come.
heating with oil is expensive. solar panels actually can heat well. just heat a block of concrete. the concrete is the battery. electrodacus is doing this now.
Burning natural gas is among the cheapest forms of heating we have, and it works 24/7/365 and at all latitudes. Solar heating using a slab as a heat reserve requires re-engineering houses completely and may be impossible in a lot of places that don't get a lot of sun during the coldest months.
sure, nat gas works great where lines go to your house. I was at a house in the seattle area last weekend (a well developed metropolis) where people had propane. Solar goes everywhere, but depends on good weather to be useful.
Perfect statement of someone who more than likely lives within a city with public utilities. However, there are actually a large amount of people in rural U.S. that have to use either Oil or Electric heating (in which both are expensive). In These rural area's, Oil heating is the norm and in order to convert to an electric heat there are extensive cost's involved (which most people in these area's cannot afford). Living in a city (especially west-coast) has certain amenities that the rest of the U.S. does not. Complete solar power in rural Wisconsin or the Dakota's for example isn't a real viable option. There is much less sunless then the west coast and extreme season weather changes (humidity, rain, snow, hot/cold).
Also need to design and build with materials that maintain as constant a temperature as possible. Double glazing, insulated walls, floors and roofs, orientation to the sun etc.
That oil will still be worth trillions for the next two decades. It won't be worthless until the global economy has moved very substantially off of oil. It won't even plunge toward worthless until demand begins to dramatically fall off, which isn't going to occur in the next two or three years.
The Saudis will likely have time to liquidate a very large portion of Aramco and its oil assets before the market for oil dries up too much. In 20 years they can exhaust over half of their oil reserves (by some estimates, they'll be a net oil importer by 2030-2035). They'll sell well over ten trillion dollars worth of oil in that time.
It will take decades to shift the global economy and industry off of oil. In ten years, the majority of cars on the road globally will still be burning gasoline. That hopefully won't be the case in 20 though.
Burning gasoline isn't the problem, burning gasoline that's sourced from the ground is. It's possible to use a lot of electricity to run gasoline combustion backwards, turning CO2 and H20 into gasoline. It's currently not economical due to electricity prices, but it may be a better option to retrofit gasoline production rather than automobile fuel consumption.
I'm not sure what part of this you're not getting. They're selling off a small stake of the state-owned oil company to diversify how they make money. They'll use the remaining money + new income from the corporations they'll build/buy to import oil. This isn't a hard concept to follow.
No, they will use that money to pay their inefficient and unproductive, sometimes parasitic public service workforce. Then their religious schools and holy men, then buy more weapons.
As soon as we hit $100/kWh in the next year or two, that oil is worthless [1] (Tesla will supposedly hit this target when the Gigafactory is at full capacity).
Clean energy investments year over year: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iWfsqt_Qmf9...
[1] https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/en...