Oil sands are not oil shale, and this alone destroys the author's credibility.
Yes it does and they also forgot to mention that light crude or sweet oil is the primary source for gasoline. Most refineries will not even buy heavy oil because they lack the cracking process to refine heavy oil. New processes have to built for heavy oil. Production of light crude world wide has decline by 2.4 millions a day since 2002.
I'd assume it would be preprocessed at the shale oil sites to turn it into the proper form for general refining.
If the refinery has a delayed coker, this problem goes away. They can chew up the asphalt stream in the heavy crude, get a cut of gasoline, coker gas oil (distillate) and other useful, upgradable products. Three new cokers at existing refineries are coming on line in 2006.