Here's my hunch about the rosy industry predictions regarding the cost of non-conventional production:  It is still printed in the media that the tar sands are profitable around $25-30 USD per barrel.  Simlarly Shell has predicted that it can produce Shale Oil for around $30-35 USD.  Anyway, my hunch is that they are continuing to recycle numbers based on analyses in the early 2000's when energy and commodity were much cheaper.  They have been, after all, using the same numbers ($25-30 for tar sands and $30-35 for shale) over the last few years despite the several fold rise in energy and commodity prices.  
in other words, Shell did an analysis on Shale oil in say 2003, based on 2002 numbers and came up with a shale oil cost of $35 per barrel.  At that time (i.e. 2002) oil cost $10 less than $35 per barrel, so they could not possibly turn a profit.  Oil then went up to $50-60/ barrel by 2005.  Yet the continued to quote the same number, $35/ barrel, and they started saying it more publicly at that time (bc/ now $35/ barrel sounds good) to try to get private and/or government investment.  but now that energy and commodities went up several fold over the last few years, it is disingenuous to continue to use the 2002 number of $35/ barrel.  Probably in today's market it still costs at least $10 per barrel more to produce shale oil than the cost of crude.