Corpus Christi is a major industrial port and the nation’s principal export hub for crude oil. An Israeli company plans to build a massive desalination plant there.
Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle file photo
The proposed desalination plant was the subject of spirited discussion during a Corpus Christi City Council meeting in June,
Blaine Young/For the Texas Tribune
The proposed Harbor Island desalination plant would generate freshwater from the salty Gulf of Mexico.
Paul Horn / Inside Climate News
CORPUS CHRISTI — Plans are moving ahead for an enormous seawater desalination plant on Texas’ Gulf Coast, described as the largest in the Western Hemisphere. But unlike other big water projects, this one wouldn’t be a public undertaking. It would belong to a private water supplier based in Israel.
IDE Technologies, which operates some of the largest seawater desalination plants in the world, was awarded the contract for the Harbor Island project by the Nueces River Authority.
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“For our company, globally, this is Project One,” IDE’s regional sales director, Mark Ellison, told the river authority’s board of directors in September. “Our top priority.”
In Texas, rapid population growth and drought have combined to stretch water supplies to their limits. Generations of state leaders have touted the promise of seawater desalination, which would produce freshwater from the salty Gulf of Mexico. But Texas still awaits its first such facility.
Today, IDE’s Harbor Island project on Corpus Christi Bay is the largest of five seawater desalination plants planned in the state.
The development of seawater desalination would unlock an abundant new source of water. But it would come at a high cost to consumers, and in the case of IDE would mark a transfer of the public water supply to private ownership. The company plans to sell the freshwater it generates to the city of Corpus Christi.
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“We’ve been here for a decade getting ready to get this started,” Ellison, a former state water official, said during a presentation last month to officials in Corpus Christi, the nation’s largest export hub for crude oil. “We’re moving very actively to get going.”
Mark Ellison, regional sales director of IDE Technologies, speaks to board members of the Nueces River Authority on Sept. 25.
Arcelia Martin / Inside Climate News
According to IDE, the Harbor Island plant would produce up to 100 million gallons per day of freshwater. It would include nearly seven miles of two-story, underwater tunnels, plus a vast system of pipelines and pump stations running more than 200 miles inland to towns and cities in South and Central Texas.
IDE plans to finance and build the plant. The Nueces River Authority would develop the pipelines. The project’s total cost is estimated at $6.4 billion. In cost and complexity, it would rival the iconic aqueducts, pipelines and dams of the American West.
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“It would be one of the more ambitious projects in U.S. history,” said Drew Molly, a former chair of the American Waterworks Association and chief water officer for the city of Houston.
On Sept. 23, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality approved a final permit for the Harbor Island plant.
Elsewhere on the coast, IDE announced plans in April for a desalination plant near Brownsville that would produce 50 million gallons per day. Nearby, a small public utility, the Laguna Madre Water District, is developing its own plant with a capacity of 5 million gallons per day.
A Canadian company, EPCOR, announced plans last year for a 27 million gallons per day (MGD) desalination plant near Houston. A plastics manufacturing complex, CC Polymers, plans to boot up a 9 MGD plant early next year. Like IDE, it wants to sell water to Corpus Christi, which has tried unsuccessfully for more than a decade to build its own desalination plant.
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“The private sector realizes that water is a scarce resource,” Molly said. “And the private sector wants to capitalize.”
It goes beyond desalination. Across the state, private and investor-owned water projects have cropped up in recent years, aiming to pump large volumes of groundwater and sell it to cities and subdivisions. That bucks the traditional model in Texas, where water supplies are typically owned by cities, towns, river authorities or utility districts.
“Water infrastructure should be owned by the community, not the property of a private company that is making a profit,” Molly said.
Corpus Christi plans to start buying water next year from a desalination plant at CC Polymers, a plastics manufacturing complex. The plant is jointly owned by companies from Taiwan, Indonesia and Mexico.
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The city also plans to buy water at an as-yet-undetermined price from IDE’s Harbor Island plant.
Roland Barrera, a member of the Corpus Christi City Council, is not happy about it. “I’m quite reluctant to move in that direction,” he said. “It’s better that the public agency owns the system.”
Corpus Christi, facing a dire water shortage, tried unsuccessfully for more than a decade to build a municipal desalination plant. Now an Israeli company plans to build a privately operated one.
Inside Climate News
Price of Private Water
IDE plans to announce in January what it will charge for water from the Harbor Island plant. After that, Corpus Christi will decide whether or not to sign a long-term contract, which would require the city to pay for water whether it uses it or not.
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“It’s too much uncertainty,” Barrera said. “It’s going to be very expensive.”
Desalinated seawater is the priciest water supply option. Public utilities must provide water at the cost of service, while private purveyors can and do seek to maximize profits.
A private project wouldn’t be eligible for the low-interest government loans. Costs to borrow money in private equity markets are nearly twice as high. That’s a mayor reason why privately financed water projects remain rare, said Mary Grant, water policy director for the nonprofit Food and Water Watch.
“It’s not very common, just because it’s very expensive,” she said.
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The higher financing costs will be passed on to customers, Grant said. Household water bills in the U.S. grew faster than inflation, grocery prices or median household income in recent years, according to a Food and Water Watch report released last month.
“Privatization will only exacerbate this affordability crisis,” Grant said.
Corpus Christi City Council member Gil Hernandez disagrees. While some costs of private waters projects are higher, others are lower, he said.
“Our cost to borrow the money is cheaper. However, our cost to build things is much more expensive,” he said. “We tend to pay two to three times as much as the private sector for construction.”
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Around the world, seawater desalination plants are owned and operated by companies, not by governments, said Hernandez, a former naval officer and sales manager at Coca-Cola Co.
Ellison said in an interview that private ownership protects communities from financial risks associated with enormous infrastructure projects.
“The private people put skin in the game,” he said. “That’s why we want to make good bets.”
Customers sign contracts with a guaranteed price of water before construction of a desalination plant begins. Developers assume all risk if projects cost more than expected, as happened in Corpus Christi.
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“Politics are colorful down here, but we don’t do politics and drama,” Ellison said. “We build plants.”
Mark Ellison, regional sales director of IDE Technologies, addresses the Corpus Christi City Council.
Inside Climate News
Desalination in Texas
Ellison joined IDE in 2015, but his role in the development of Texas’ desalination policy goes back further than that.
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With a bachelor’s degree in agricultural education from Texas A&M University, Ellison has served as director of the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, as a founding board member of the Texas-Israel Chamber of Commerce, as a special advisor to the Texas Water Development Board and as manager of strategic water initiatives in the office of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
Almost 25 years have passed since Perry launched an initiative to test large-scale seawater desalination in Texas. In that time, California and Florida saw their first plants come online.
But in Texas, companies including Massachusetts-based Poseidon Water, Kansas-based Kiewit and Florida-based Seven Seas pursued projects that ultimately stalled, unable to compete with the low cost of water from Texas’ aquifers and rivers.
“We have had very prolific rivers up to this point,” said Kyle Frazier, executive director of the Texas Desalination Association, an industry group. “In the last 10 years, as the drought has become more persistent, the end users have started looking for other options.”
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IDE began planning its first Texas project in 2015 at Port Freeport, south of Houston, where Dow Chemical Co. needed water to expand its manufacturing complex. That project stalled after Dow decided to enlarge its reservoir instead.
Desalination works best at scale, when large facilities can supply large water markets, said Sean Strawbridge, a former CEO of the Port of Corpus Christi who later founded a company called US Desalination.
“Texas is a fragmented market,” he said. “It’s a very inefficient market because water has historically been left to small utilities.”
In contrast, Strawbridge pointed to Israel, where the government developed a nationwide network of pipelines. In Israel, which gets the vast majority of its domestic water supply from desalinated seawater, a treatment facility built anywhere in the country can easily connect to customers everywhere.
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Israel is about the size of the nine-county Houston region. Building a similar system in Texas would be a monumental endeavor, but that hasn’t stopped state leaders from trying.
“If a dry, arid nation of 15 million people can solve for its water problems, there’s no reason why the great state of Texas, with 30 million people, can’t,” Strawbridge said.
Then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry showed great interest in Israel’s seawater desalination technology.
Eric Gay, STF / Associated Press
‘The Two Lone Star States’
IDE was there when Israel first confronted its water problem, Lihy Teurstein, CEO of IDE Water Assets, said during a panel discussion at the 2023 annual conference of the Texas Water Development Board.
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After Israel declared independence in 1948, immigrants began to pour into an arid region with few natural lakes, rivers or aquifers, Teurstein said.
“Our first prime minister realized that with the growth in the country there’s going to be a need for new sources of water,” she said. “That’s when IDE started to operate.”
The company, then state-owned, built desalination plants relied on heating seawater and collecting freshwater from evaporation, a crude method by today’s standards. Later, IDE pioneered membrane filtration technology. “It enabled the use of seawater for potable water at affordable prices,” Teurstein said.
IDE was transferred to private ownership in the 1990s, opened its first membrane desalination plant in 2000 and began to export its technology around the world.
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Ellison and Perry made official visits to Israel in 1992 and 1996 to learn about agriculture and water management. Perry became governor in 2000 in 2005 appointed Ellison director of the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.
The two visited Israel again in 2007, when Perry received the “Friend of Zion” award. After that, Perry created the Texas-Israel Chamber of Commerce, which gave Ellison, a board member, its Chairman’s Award in 2008.
In 2013, Perry made Ellison a special advisor on economic development at the Texas Water Development Board. Later that year, state lawmakers introduced legislation to create the State Water Implementation Fund of Texas (SWIFT), a program to fund development of water infrastructure.
Texas voters approved SWIFT in November 2013, and in 2015, legislators passed a bill to streamline the granting of permits for seawater desalination facilities “in order to avoid unnecessary costs, delays, and uncertainty and thereby help justify the investment of significant resources in the development of such facilities.”
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That same year, IDE opened an office on Congress Avenue in Austin, two blocks from the state capital, with Ellison at its leader.
Gov. Greg Abbott took office in 2015 and visited Israel and toured an IDE facility following year.
Corpus Christi is a major industrial port and the nation’s principal export hub for crude oil. An Israeli company plans to build a massive desalination plant there.
Jon Shapley/For Inside Climate News
‘Not an Option’
At the time, a handful of desalination projects had been proposed along the Texas coast, and policymakers were optimistic, said Todd Votteler, a former executive manager for the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority.
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“Everybody thought something was coming soon,” he said.
Robert Mace, a former deputy executive administrator of the Texas Water Development Board, remembers the bullish mood.
“When I was at the board, IDE would parade through,” Mace said. “An associate with IDE, who used to be an upper-level official in the Israeli government, told us what we needed to do.”
Among the obstacles: Building a vast pipeline network is easier than Israel than in Texas, where it would require litigating claims of eminent domain with hundreds of thousands of landowners.
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One way to avoid that cost is to build the plant next to an industrial customer. IDE built large desalination plants in India and China, both at refineries, Ellison told an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2015.
Industrial operators were starting to view water as they viewed power, as an essential resource for which they needed a readily accessible backup supply, Ellison said then.
“They cannot afford to shut down,” Ellison said. “Running out of water is not an option. They need an uninterruptible supply.”
Rivalry in Corpus Christi
In Corpus Christi, industrial giants including Valero, OxyChem, Citgo, Flint Hills Resources and Cheniere Energy formed a working group in November 2014 to study developing a private desalination plant.
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The group concluded it would be more affordable if built by the city with low-interest public financing, specifically SWIFT loans from the state.
Corpus Christi took up the project, but it languished for years. In September 2020, the city invited 10 companies and partnerships, including IDE, to pitch proposals.
IDE proposed to partner with U.S. construction giant Kiewit to build a privately owned desalination plant that would sell water to the city. Other companies made similar proposals.
The city insisted on municipal ownership. Leaders of the Port of Corpus Christi Authority pushed for a privately owned project at Harbor Island.
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City officials were outraged in 2022 to learn that the port planned to seek state funding for the project. The City Council adopted a resolution calling on the port to abandon the idea.
The port refused. It sent a delegation of state and local leaders on a trip to Israel to visit IDE facilities.
But after Strawbridge resigned as CEO of the port in 2023, its Harbor Island project stalled.
The Harbor Island Project
The city, meanwhile, moved forward with plans for a municipal desalination plant. In 2024, Corpus Christi invited developers to submit proposals. Kiewit, the construction giant that previously proposed to partner with IDE, applied on its own.
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IDE requested a 45-day extension of the submission deadline to develop a proposal in partnership with Shikun & Binui, the largest commercial real estate developer in Israel. Corpus Christi denied the request.
Kiewit won the nearly $1 billion contract.
Then the Port of Corpus Christi, in September 2024, received an unsolicited offer from the Nueces River Authority to assume responsibility for the port’s Harbor Island project.
The river authority’ executive director, John Byrum, traveled across South and Central Texas, telling small cities and utility districts about his plan to build an enormous pipeline carrying desalinated seawater from the coast and offering an opportunity to reserve a portion of the supply, for a fee.
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Byrum collected millions of dollars in reservation fees, secured a lease for Harbor Island, commissioned early engineering services and hired lobbyists in Austin.
In August 2025, Byrum presented the Corpus Christi City Council with a chance to reserve 50 million gallons per day from the Harbor Island plant for a $2.7 million deposit. The city council approved the payment and cancelled its $1 billion contract with Kiewit.
Three weeks later, the river authority hired Civitas Engineering Group to develop a request for proposals for companies to build the Harbor Island desalination plant. Would-be bidder asked for clarification on a number of points, including where funding for the initial phase of the project would come from.
The river authority said it had entered into preliminary reservation agreements with customers expected to have definitive water purchase agreements with municipalities and industrial customers as the primary source of funding. The agency is also pursuing state and federal grants.
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The prospective developers also wanted to know how much the reservation holders expected to pay for desalinated water. The agency said the cost would be $10 to $15 per 1,000 gallons.
In May, the river authority selected IDE as its partner on the project.
An Insurance Policy?
The agency estimated the project’s cost at $6.4 billion, more than the small authority could pay.
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“Anybody that’s looking at these three months should have some real concerns,” board member Dan Suckley said at the authority’s June 25 meeting. “Conceivably, we’re out of money at the end of August.”
On Aug. 28, the Texas Water Development Board held a special, nine-minute board meeting to consider a $7 million grant for the Harbor Island project.
“This is a little bit of an unusual request,” board member Brady Franks said during the session. “How did it make its way to the board?”
Kevin Smith, the board’s south region manager, responded. “The governor’s office has directed the Texas Water Development Board’s executive administrator to award funding,” he said.
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The state money would help the Nueces River Authority develop the pipeline system for the project, Byrum said at the meeting. IDE would finance the desalination plant with private funds, he said.
Byrum returned to the Corpus Christi City Council on Sept. 1 with an update on the project. The partners still hadn’t secured full financing, Byrum said, but he was optimistic about help from the federal government.
“I believe they’re going to come through,” he said.
Byrum said that Corpus Christi soon would need to sign a contract committing to purchase up to 50 million gallons of water per day, the amount the city had already reserved. The contract would require Corpus Christi to pay for the water whether it needed it or not.
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Byrum assured council members they would need the water. He displayed a chart showing that regional water demand would exceed supply by 200 million gallons per day by 2030.
“Those projections seem awfully high,” said council member Sylvia Campos. “How can we believe you?”
“You have to believe this,” Byrum said. “This is all you’ve got.”
Two weeks later, Byrum announced his resignation from the river authority, days before its board was scheduled to discuss his possible termination at its Sept. 25 meeting.
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“It hurts,” Byrum said of walking away from the Harbor Island project. “It was a big part of what I was doing.”
The river authority planned to finance the rest of the pipeline project by signing water contracts with its customers, according to a handout provided to board members at the meeting.
Ellison told the board that IDE hoped to select a general contractor soon, and that the company would put a final price tag on water generated by the Harbor Island plant.
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The water will be more expensive than groundwater or fresh surface water, Ellison said.
“But it’s the one that won’t run out,” he added. “Look at it as an insurance policy.”