This story originally was published by Southerly.
Betty Osceola, an elder of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, lives in Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida, where a small Texas-based oil developer wants to build seven new wells. Burnett Oil Company slipped in its application Jan. 22, days before President Joe Biden signed an executive order pausing new oil and gas leases on public lands. I wasn’t surprised, Osceola said through a bitter laugh she knew it would happen eventually.
Big Cypress is part of the Greater Everglades and spans 729,000 acres a size comparable to Rhode Island across the heart of South Florida. Ecologists describe it as a mosaic of distinct yet interconnected wetland ecosystems: hardwood hammocks, pine flatwoods, sawgrass prairies, marshes, sloughs and gloomy cypress domes with cottonmouths and ghost orchids and endangered panthers.
Jaclyn Lopez, Center for Biological Diversity, (727) 490-9190, jlopez@biologicaldiversity.org
Emily Deanne, National Resources Defense Council, (860) 318-6636, edeanne@nrdc.org
Hike, Rally to Save Everglades’ Big Cypress Set for Saturday
National Preserve Threatened by Oil Drilling
BIG CYPRESS NATIONAL PRESERVE,
Fla. At 9 a.m. on Saturday conservation advocates Betty Osceola and the Rev. Houston Cypress will lead environmental leaders and the media on a socially distanced hike in Big Cypress National Preserve along the route of a proposed oil well pad access road.
A press conference and socially distanced rally will follow the hike. Supporters can follow the event live online.
The natural gas storage report from the EIA for the week ending January 29th indicated that the amount of natural gas held in underground storage in the US fell by 192 billion cubic feet to 2,689 billion cubic feet by the end of the week, which left our gas supplies 41 billion cubic feet, or 1.5% higher than the 2,648 billion cubic feet that were in storage on January 29th of last year, and 198 billion cubic feet, or 7.9% above the five-year average of 2,491 billion cubic feet of natural gas that have been in storage as of the 29th of January in recent years..the 192 billion cubic feet that were drawn out of US natural gas storage this week was a bit less than the average forecast of a 195 billion cubic foot withdrawal from an S&P Global Platts survey of analysts, but more than the 155 billion cubic foot withdrawal from natural gas storage seen during the corresponding week of a year earlier, and also more than the average withdrawal of 146 billion cubic feet of natural gas that have