Despite the eternal concern in certain circles that additional regulation will stifle industry, the new law did not dampen the widespread enthusiasm for oil shale. By 1922 at least 100 companies had formed to unlock the secret of the oil in the rock. That number again and more joined the rush during the mid-1920s, until the onset of the Great Depression and a flood of new lower-cost free-flowing crude oil discoveries conspired to kill the boom.
There wasn't much to show for all the commotion. The small mining outfits had never been able to raise sufficient capital to pursue ventures on a profitable scale. And, in any case, the industry never developed effective technology to extract the fuel from the rock in a way that would make it competitive with domestic liquid oil. With only token amounts of oil to show for their efforts, companies shut down and abandoned the Shale Country as quickly as they had appeared. While some prospectors pocketed their deeds in hopes of waiting out the bust, most sold their claims to long-term speculators who were willing to bet on oil shale's future.
Even the federal government got out of the oil shale business. The Bureau of Mines, which opened an experimental mine and processing facility on Naval Oil Shale Reserve land near Rulison (about 11 miles west of Rifle) in 1925, closed its operation in the summer of 1929. That same year, the Teapot Dome Scandal concluded with former Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall going to prison for accepting bribes in exchange for leasing the strategic oil reserves at Elk Hills and Teapot Dome. Eager to preclude any chance of another headline-grabbing scandal in the nation's energy fields, in 1930 President Herbert Hoover issued Executive Order 5327 temporarily (but indefinitely) withdrawing all federal oil shale lands from lease "for the purpose of investigation, examination, and classification."10 The gesture was largely symbolic - the boom had played itself out and, for the time being, the industry was moribund.