“While it is true that the shale oil is “recoverable,” the cost of extracting the oil from the shale would make any large scale operations prohibitively expensive at this time. It takes a tremendous amount of heat and pressure to recover the oil from shale - extractors would expend almost as much energy removing the oil, refining it, and bringing it to market than the oil itself would generate.”
That’s exactly what they used to say about the Alberta oil sands, 30 or so years ago. (BTW, for fun, look up the use of nuclear weapons to extract oil from deposits in shale.)
That dang radiation.
I remember decades ago there was a serious suggestion that an ocean level canal across Nicaraguan could be built with nucs.