Edward L. Doheny prices were high. The Mexican Petroleum Company was the largest in Mexico, and Mexico was the largest oil producer in the world. In 1922 Albert B. Fall, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, leased the oil field at Elk Hills, California, to the Pan American Petroleum & Transport Company. Around the same time, the Teapot Dome Field in Wyoming was leased to Sinclair Consolidated Oil Corporation. Both oilfields were part of the US Navy's petroleum reserves. Neither lease was subject to competitive bidding. In 1924 rumors about corruption in the deals escalated into the Teapot Dome scandal. Doheny's reputation was somewhat
Teapot Dome scandal Fountains rode home from a meeting at Fall's ranch. Another significant outcome was the Supreme Court's ruling in "McGrain v. Daugherty" (1927) which, for the first time, explicitly established that Congress had the power to compel testimony. The field was then idled for 49 years, but went back into production in 1976. After earning over $569 million in revenue having extracted of oil over the previous 39 years, in February 2015, the Department of Energy sold the oil field for $45 million to Stranded Oil Resources Corp. Although this scandal has been infamously used as a basis of comparison most