“Saudi Arabia is not in a comfortable position,” says Karen Young, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute and director of its Program on Economics and Energy. “There will be customers for oil in 10 and 20 years from now. But [every oil producer] is going to be competing for a smaller and smaller number of buyers.”
The Middle East Institute’s Young says that Riyadh is moving too slowly into renewable energy, where the kingdom has a natural advantage in solar power thanks to its sun-scorched desert. “Nothing happens overnight,” she says. “[But] when you look at the results so far, it’s tiny.”