Thank you so much for this post - learned a lot. Thank goodness for the brilliant and common sense minds that went into figuring this out. Fantastic!
What is really needed is for the government to ask for bids on a million barrels of shale oil, promising to buy from the lowest bidder. That will help industry get started producing the stuff big-time.
Lacking that, I'm afraid inertia (or worse) on the part of the big oil companies will stymie the effort.