Making hydrocarbons is no big deal. The germans were doing it on an industrial scale in WW2. Do it at a profit without government subsidies on a fair economic playing field and I’ll be impressed.
1. The relative low price of drilling is due to billions of years of building a surplus through the natural processes. It doesn’t represent the costs, when we get ahead of the earth’s ability to replace what we take.
2. As we refine the process, it can be expected to become cheaper over time as we improve our competency and increase the scale. We do have the advance of being able to scale up in the American desert, to cover tens of square miles, to produce what is needed for the American economy.
The Germans didn’t have the process optimized. The best they could do was produce around 7 barrels of oil for every ton of coal.
I think we could do better.