Birds fly over the Port of Corpus Christi as the sun sets Thursday, Nov. 16, 2023, in Corpus Christi.
Jon Shapley/Staff photographer
When Elida Castillo drives around Corpus Christi, she doesn’t see a city about to run out of water. Instead, Castillo, who leads an environmental advocacy group called Chispa Texas, sees car washes opening; houses being built in new subdivisions; new refinery smokestacks sprouting along Corpus Christi Bay.
But the city is running out of water. If nothing changes by late next year the city will begin curtailing usage by 25%, leaving both residents and the region’s massive petrochemical industry to figure how to make do with a lot less.
READ MORE: Lawmakers hope desalination can bring new water to Texas. Critics want protections for the coast.
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The situation became even more dire in September, when city council members abruptly voted to stop work on a controversial seawater desalination plant called Inner Harbor, alarmed by the plant’s ballooning cost — estimated at $1.2 billion.
Corpus Christi is a “microcosm of a bigger problem,” said Drew Molly, who until recently was the chief operating officer of Corpus Christi Water. As the state’s water crisis deepens, cities and communities will be faced with difficult questions: How much water do we need? How much are we willing to pay? And who will foot the bill?
Desalinating seawater is one solution, offering the promise of a limitless, drought-free water. But the costs are extraordinary.
“I think the state leadership sees big, massive projects, and they look at local entities and go, why can’t you guys build this?” Molly said. “And the answer is we can’t do it because we can’t afford it.”
Today, Corpus Christi relies entirely on surface water, mostly from the Nueces River. But years of drought coupled with industry growth have sucked most of the city’s reservoirs dry. The city’s main source of water, Choke Canyon Reservoir, is at 11% capacity. Farther downstream, Lake Corpus Christi is 15% full.
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A dashboard on the city’s website displays the number of days until a water emergency: 416, 415, 414.
RELATED: Corpus Christi countered Greg Abbott on a water plant. His office warns it could cost them funding
The Inner Harbor project would have been the state’s first ocean-based desalination plant in over a half century. The first in the country opened in Freeport, Texas, in 1961, a demonstration plant funded by the federal Office of Saline Water.
A postcard image of the first ocean-based desalination plant in the country, opened in Freeport, Texas, in 1961.
Courtesy of Robert Mace
“Today is an important step towards the achievement of one of man’s oldest dreams: securing freshwater from saltwater,” President John F. Kennedy said when the plant opened, speaking by phone at the dedication.
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But after only eight years, federal funding ran out and the plant shuttered; without subsidy, the water was too expensive.
‘Tip of the iceburg’
City leaders worried about the cost of water produced by the Inner Harbor project, especially after new estimates this year put the plant’s cost at $1.2 billion, a huge jump from the $760 million price tag from a year before. Water from the plant would cost roughly twice as much per thousand gallons as existing sources.
Environmentalists celebrated the council’s about-face. For years, they’d pointed to studies that showed that discharging the plant’s super-salty brine directly into the Corpus Christi Bay could raise salinity levels and harm marine life, threatening the region’s coastal ecosystem and the tourism it supports.
But for some, it was too late to cancel a project that had become pivotal to the region’s future. Banking on the new supply, city leaders had already sold most of the city’s surface water to industrial users, as the fracking boom in west Texas led to new refineries and chemical plants along the Gulf Coast.
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Shortly after the vote, Moody’s announced it was reviewing the city’s bond rating, triggered by an “unexpected acceleration of water depletion risk” due to “the recent cancellation of a long-term effort to enhance … water supply without an adequate replacement.”
State leaders called the decision shortsighted and said it undermined the credibility of the city, which had already accepted $231 million in state loans for the project. The city is on the hook for that debt — plus $136 million in interest — whether or not the desalination plant is ever built.
A sign sits in a residential yard on Thursday, Nov. 16, 2023, in the Hillcrest neighborhood in Corpus Christi.
Jon Shapley/Staff photographer
That cost will get passed along to residential ratepayers through an $8 monthly charge, according to city documents. (Industrial users, which make up the bulk of the city’s water supply, will skirt the cost because they are outside city limits.)
Building the plant would have cost residential users only slightly more — around $11 a month.
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State leaders recognize that they will have to help foot the bill for large-scale water projects. Earlier this year, lawmakers agreed to carve out $1 billion from the state’s tax revenue annually for 20 years to fund those efforts.
But even that is “the tip of the iceberg of what’s needed,” said state Rep. Cody Harris, a Palestine Republican who authored the legislation for dedicated water funding. “In order to bring economies of scale into the picture and start to lower the cost of desalination, the state will have to play a large role in funding some of these projects very heavily up front.”
Growing industrial demand
Industry leaders have been talking about desalinating seawater for 30 years, said Errol Summerlin, a retired lawyer who co-founded the Coastal Alliance to Protect our Environment, an alliance of grassroots groups and nonprofits, to fight the Inner Harbor plant.
“You can’t help but look out over the bay and say, man, there’s got to be a way we can use that water,” he said.
It wasn’t until the 2011 drought forced petrochemical plants to curtail water usage that the conversation got serious, he said.
In 2018, industrial users agreed to pay an ongoing surcharge of $0.25 for every 1,000 gallons consumed in order to avoid having their water use restricted during future droughts. That surcharge, which was eventually raised to $0.31, was intended to fund new water projects, like desalination.
“Part of how they came up with 31 cents … was that they were going to pay for 100% of the costs of the new water supply project,” said Molly, who now works as the chief water officer at Houston Public Works.
Renoir LeMarcus Knox gets into his truck Thursday, Nov. 16, 2023, in the Hillcrest neighborhood in Corpus Christi. The neighborhood is mostly made of empty lots. “This is what the social injustice of petroleum looks like,” he said.
Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle
That hasn’t happened. To date, industrial users have paid just $31.5 million in surcharges, a fraction of even the Inner Harbor’s initial price tag.
Molly said large-volume users should be paying more to fund new water projects. “The industry uses most of our water, and they should pay probably a little bit more than what they’ve been paying in the past,” he said. “Why is that not the case? I think it falls on the elected officials [and] staff.”
Roughly half of the water sold by Corpus Christi Water goes to petrochemical companies and refineries, which use that water for cleaning, generating steam and cooling, said Bob Paulison, the executive director of the Coastal Bend Industry Association, a trade group.
If water use is restricted, many plants will stop operating altogether or significantly scale back operations, he said, noting the industry had already made a “substantial contribution” to the water utility through its rates and the $0.31 surcharge.
The council’s vote has created “a lot of uncertainty” for businesses, he said. “The question that’s on everybody’s mind is: What’s the plan?”
Scrambling for alternatives
The city council is still considering several options to resurrect the Inner Harbor project, including turning it over to the second-place bidder. The Gulf Coast Authority, a state entity based in Houston, has expressed interest in taking over the project.
“We must do something,” Mayor Paulette Guajardo said during a water workshop in early October. “The clock is ticking.”
In the meantime, the city has started pumping groundwater from the Evangeline Aquifer into the Nueces River.
And city manager Peter Zanoni reported that the city planned to buy the rights to pump nearly 23,000 acre feet of fresh groundwater from the Evangeline in nearby San Patricio County, which would be added to an existing pipeline carrying surface water to the city’s water treatment facility. But even under the “best possible timeline,” Molly told council members in September, that water wouldn’t arrive in Corpus Christi until early 2029.
Residents and farmers who already use that groundwater are fiercely opposed to the deal. While most of San Patricio County — which includes the petrochemical complex clustered on the northern side of the bay — buys water from Corpus Christi, the city of Sinton relies entirely on groundwater.
“We’re going to contest every permit they try to get,” Sinton’s city manager, John Hobson, said in an interview, noting that Corpus Christi planned to pump 65% of the groundwater district’s available water.
“If they would have approved desal, there’s no reason for them to come and take groundwater,” he said. “They would have the water they needed.”
Environmental activists who have been critical of the desalination project see it as supporting the growth of an unsustainable industry that has only brought more pollution and inequality to Corpus Christi.
“We are being forced into this idea that we need this desal plant because we’re not going to have water,” Castillo said. “Well, y’all are still talking about bringing on large-volume water users. You haven’t had the industry curtail their usage.”
Summerlin agreed, saying the city should put a moratorium on new industrial growth while it secures its water supply. “As long as the city is promoting industrial development, we’re going to continually dig ourselves in a hole,” he said. “No sooner do we get a new supply in place when a large industrial user comes calling for that water.”
But others see that growth as fundamental to the identity of the city — and state. “You just have to decide what kind of community you want to be,” said Roland Barrera, a city council member who supports the Inner Harbor project. “Do we want to foster economic growth and foster industry and do so responsibly or [just say] don’t come to Corpus Christi, don’t come to the coast? Because the demand for the product is still going to be there.”
Many water experts are still bullish on seawater desalination. “There’s a realization out there that these projects are getting really large and cost prohibitive, but they’re not really optional at some point,” said Perry Fowler, the executive director of the Texas Water Infrastructure Network.
About a half dozen seawater desalination projects are in some stage of development along the Gulf Coast, from Brownsville to Freeport. Last week, an Arizona-based company called EPCOR filed permits with the state to build a seawater desalination plant in Texas City that would provide fresh drinking water to Harris and Galveston counties.
Many of these projects are being developed by private companies, which aim to sell the water to public utilities. “Water is the new oil and gas,” Molly said. “You have private sector companies that are coming in and trying to figure out how to have real space in this industry.”
Those companies can shoulder risk for longer — but ratepayers lose the transparency and accountability that come with public projects, Molly said.
“Hopefully the lesson [from Corpus Christi] isn’t that it’s going to be politically impossible to get a seawater desal plant through a publicly elected body,” said Robert Mace, the executive director of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University. But, he said, it would likely “put a damper” on similar efforts.
“People are very focused on the here and now — what’s happening with this water cost, how this affects my water bill,” he said. “We live in a dry state and we face droughts. And these droughts are probably gonna get worse.”