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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.<\/p>\n
Jon Shapley\/Houston Chronicle file photo<\/p>\n
The proposed desalination plant was the subject of spirited discussion during a Corpus Christi City Council meeting in June,<\/p>\n
Blaine Young\/For the Texas Tribune<\/p>\n
The proposed Harbor Island desalination plant would generate freshwater from the salty Gulf of Mexico.<\/p>\n
Paul Horn \/ Inside Climate News<\/p>\n
CORPUS CHRISTI \u2014 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\u2019t be a public undertaking. It would belong to a private water supplier based in Israel.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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IDE Technologies, which operates some of the largest seawater desalination plants in the world, was awarded the contract for\u00a0the Harbor Island project<\/a> by the Nueces River Authority.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cFor our company, globally, this is Project One,\u201d\u00a0IDE’s regional sales director, Mark Ellison, told the river authority’s board of directors in September. \u201cOur top priority.\u201d<\/p>\n In Texas, rapid population growth and\u00a0drought<\/a> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Today,\u00a0IDE\u2019s Harbor Island project<\/a> on Corpus Christi Bay is the largest of five seawater desalination plants planned in the state.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0plans to sell the freshwater it generates to the city of Corpus Christi.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been here for a decade getting ready to get this started,\u201d Ellison, a former state water official, said during a presentation last month<\/a> to officials in Corpus Christi, the nation\u2019s largest export hub for crude oil. \u201cWe\u2019re moving very actively to get going.\u201d<\/p>\n Mark Ellison,\u00a0regional sales director of IDE Technologies, speaks to board members of the\u00a0Nueces River Authority on Sept. 25.<\/p>\n Arcelia Martin \/ Inside Climate News<\/p>\n 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\u00a0system of pipelines and pump stations<\/a> running more than 200 miles inland to towns and cities in South and Central Texas.\u00a0<\/p>\n IDE plans to finance and build the plant. The Nueces River Authority would develop the pipelines. The project’s total cost\u00a0is estimated at $6.4 billion. In cost and complexity, it would rival the iconic aqueducts, pipelines and dams of the American West.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cIt would be one of the more ambitious projects in U.S. history,\u201d said Drew Molly, a former chair of the American Waterworks Association and chief water officer for the city of Houston.<\/p>\n On Sept. 23, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality approved a final permit<\/a> for the Harbor Island plant.<\/p>\n Elsewhere on the coast, IDE announced plans in April<\/a> for a desalination plant near\u00a0Brownsville 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n A Canadian company, EPCOR, announced plans<\/a> 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\u00a0wants to sell water to Corpus Christi, which has tried unsuccessfully for more than a decade<\/a>\u00a0to build its own desalination plant.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cThe private sector realizes that water is a scarce resource,\u201d Molly said. \u201cAnd the private sector wants to capitalize.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n It goes beyond desalination. Across the state, private and investor-owned water projects<\/a> have cropped up in recent years, aiming to pump large volumes of groundwater<\/a> and sell it to\u00a0cities and subdivisions<\/a>. That bucks the traditional model in Texas, where water supplies are typically owned by cities, towns, river authorities or utility districts.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWater infrastructure should be owned by the community, not the property of a private company that is making a profit,\u201d Molly said.<\/p>\n Corpus Christi plans to\u00a0start buying water<\/a> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n The city also plans to buy water at an as-yet-undetermined price from\u00a0IDE\u2019s Harbor Island plant.<\/p>\n Roland Barrera, a member of the Corpus Christi City Council, is not happy about it. \u201cI’m quite reluctant to move in that direction,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s better that the public agency owns the system.\u201d<\/p>\n Corpus Christi, facing a dire water shortage, tried unsuccessfully for\u00a0more than a decade to build a municipal desalination plant. Now an Israeli company plans to build a privately operated one.<\/p>\n Inside Climate News<\/p>\n Price of Private Water<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s too much uncertainty,\u201d Barrera said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be very expensive.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n A private project wouldn\u2019t be eligible for the low-interest government loans. Costs to borrow money in private equity markets are nearly twice as high. That\u2019s a mayor reason why privately financed water projects remain rare, said Mary Grant, water policy director for the nonprofit Food and Water Watch.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not very common, just because it\u2019s very expensive,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n The higher financing costs will be passed on to customers, Grant said. Household water bills in the U.S.\u00a0grew faster than inflation<\/a>, grocery prices or median household income in recent years, according to a Food and Water Watch report released last month.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cPrivatization will only exacerbate this affordability crisis,\u201d Grant said.<\/p>\n Corpus Christi City Council member Gil Hernandez disagrees. While some costs of private waters projects are higher, others are lower, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cOur cost to borrow the money is cheaper. However, our cost to build things is much more expensive,\u201d he said. \u201cWe tend to pay two to three times as much as the private sector for construction.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ellison\u00a0said in an interview that private ownership protects communities from financial risks associated with enormous infrastructure projects.<\/p>\n \u201cThe private people put skin in the game,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s why we want to make good bets.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cPolitics are colorful down here, but we don’t do politics and drama,\u201d Ellison said. \u201cWe build plants.\u201d<\/p>\n Mark Ellison, regional sales director of IDE Technologies, addresses the Corpus Christi City Council.<\/p>\n Inside Climate News<\/p>\n Desalination in Texas<\/p>\n Ellison joined IDE in 2015, but his role in the development of Texas\u2019 desalination policy goes back further than that.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n But in Texas, companies including Massachusetts-based Poseidon Water, Kansas-based\u00a0Kiewit and Florida-based Seven Seas pursued projects that ultimately stalled, unable to compete with the low cost of water from Texas\u2019 aquifers and rivers.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe have had very prolific rivers up to this point,\u201d said Kyle\u00a0Frazier, executive director of the Texas Desalination Association, an industry group. \u201cIn the last 10 years, as the drought has become more persistent, the end users have started looking for other options.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cTexas is a fragmented market,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a very inefficient market because water has historically been left to small utilities.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n 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\u2019t stopped state leaders from trying.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf a dry, arid nation of 15 million people can solve for its water problems, there\u2019s no reason why the great state of Texas, with 30 million people, can\u2019t,\u201d\u00a0Strawbridge said.<\/p>\n Then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry showed great interest in Israel’s seawater desalination technology.<\/p>\n Eric Gay, STF \/ Associated Press<\/p>\n ‘The Two Lone Star States’<\/p>\n IDE was there when Israel first confronted its water problem,\u00a0Lihy Teurstein, CEO of IDE Water Assets, said during a panel discussion at the 2023 annual conference of the Texas Water Development Board.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n After Israel declared independence in 1948, immigrants began to pour into an arid region with few natural lakes, rivers or aquifers,\u00a0Teurstein said.<\/p>\n \u201cOur first prime minister realized that with the growth in the country there\u2019s going to\u00a0be a need for new sources of water,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s when IDE started to operate.\u201d<\/p>\n 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,\u00a0IDE pioneered membrane filtration technology. \u201cIt enabled the use of seawater for potable water at affordable prices,\u201d Teurstein said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n The two visited Israel again in 2007, when Perry received the \u201cFriend of Zion\u201d award. After that, Perry created the Texas-Israel Chamber of Commerce, which gave Ellison, a board member, its Chairman\u2019s Award in 2008.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0to fund development of water infrastructure.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Texas voters approved SWIFT in November 2013, and in 2015, legislators passed a bill<\/a> to streamline the granting of permits for seawater desalination facilities \u201cin order to avoid unnecessary costs, delays, and uncertainty and thereby help justify the investment of significant resources in the development of such facilities.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n That same year,\u00a0IDE opened an office<\/a> on Congress Avenue in Austin, two blocks from the state capital, with Ellison at its leader.\u00a0<\/p>\n Gov. Greg Abbott took office in 2015 and visited Israel and\u00a0toured an IDE facility<\/a> following year.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Jon Shapley\/For Inside Climate News<\/p>\n ‘Not an Option’<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody thought something was coming soon,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Robert Mace, a former deputy executive administrator of the Texas Water Development Board, remembers the bullish mood.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I was at the board,\u00a0IDE would parade through,\u201d Mace said. \u201cAn associate with IDE, who used to be an upper-level official in the Israeli government, told us what we needed to do.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n One way to avoid that cost is to build the plant next to an industrial customer.\u00a0IDE built large desalination plants in India and China, both at refineries, Ellison told an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2015.\u00a0<\/p>\n Industrial operators were starting to view water as they viewed power, as an essential resource for which they needed a readily accessible backup supply,\u00a0Ellison said<\/a> then.<\/p>\n \u201cThey cannot afford to shut down,\u201d Ellison said. \u201cRunning out of water is not an option. They need an uninterruptible supply.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Rivalry in Corpus Christi<\/p>\n In Corpus Christi, industrial giants including Valero,\u00a0OxyChem, Citgo, Flint Hills Resources and Cheniere Energy formed a working group<\/a> in November 2014 to study developing a private desalination plant.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n The group concluded it would be more affordable if built by the city with low-interest public financing, specifically SWIFT loans from the state.<\/p>\n Corpus Christi took up the project, but it languished for years. In September 2020, the city invited\u00a010 companies and partnerships<\/a>, including IDE, to pitch proposals.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n The city insisted on municipal ownership. Leaders of the Port of Corpus Christi Authority pushed for a privately owned project at Harbor Island.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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