The thing with oil is that it's portable, so you can use it to fuel your own massively powerful, totally mobile, generating plant ie; internal combustion engine. There are plenty of other sources of energy out there, and plenty of ways to use them which extracts maximum benefit for each unit burnt, and plenty of ways to harness these outputs which to reduce our reliance on oil products for transports and heating, but in our commercail and regulatory environment we don't use them.
That's certainly part of it, but the main reason we use petroleum fuels is more fundamental. Petrol-fuels simply put have several major advantages for use in an vehicle:
1 - liquid (as you noted), and therefore very portable...and dispensable by simply pouring without any need to screw on/make airtight
2 - high energy density: a few gallons will run a vehicle for hours/hundreds of miles
3 - CHEAP!! Seriously, except for the top of the fuel cost spike it was cheaper than water per gallon. No other energy source can be diseminated so cheaply or easily...at least until peak oil; changes this
Biofuels, even efficient sugar-based processes, still require all the associated overhead of crop growth, harvest, and conversion, and even then the shear demand makes you have to chose between growing food and growing fuel. Hydrogen/nat. gas/etc. are gasses, therefore requiring presurized airtight storage in special containers, and would need rather a lot of space, limiting range, at least until better ways to store them are found. Coal-to-liquid also requires expensive conversion processes. Until batteries get much better than OTL today, electric is out for anything much beyond a 100 mi radius.
So while it burns inefficiently and filthy, petroleum will probably remain the main fuel for vehicles until peak oil forces prices so high that other fuels become competative. Strangely, oil shale will also be competative then, making Canada an Oil Giant!
Ironically, the OP probably extends petroleum's use longer than OTL.