You mention that this oil may be uneconomical to recover. This is only partially true. While a well is expensive to drill the costs are recovered in the first few months of operation. The cost of this oil comes from transport. People I have spoken with peg it around $22 a barrel to ship due to lack of pipeline capacity, meaning most of the oil is shipped by rail. As long as oil prices are high this isn't a problem. However should the price fall it could become economical due to shipping concerns. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline was supposed to have a load station in montana for some of this oil. However, many people in the area speculate it was nixed due to pressure from Obama's good friend, Warren Buffet. Berkshire Hathaway owns a 100% stake in Burlington northern Santa Fey railroad that benefits greatly from the increased rail traffic.
I would add that the cost of rail transportation of oil is relatively cheap. Moving freight by rail is 3 times more fuel efficient than moving freight on the highway. Trains can move a ton of freight nearly 500 miles on a single gallon of fuel. I thing vast majority of the transportation cost for domestic oil must be in the local delivery (last 50 or 100 miles) where it's in a tank on the back of a truck.
But either way, can largely discount the cost of shipping oil, assuming that the person producing it is also the one transporting it. When you're talking about a 100000 gallons being transported on trucks, and consuming maybe 500 or 1000 gallons of that... it's simply added cost of doing business and really shouldn't affect prices at the pump.
