Eight years ago, at the height of the shale-oil boom, a committee of industry giants and public officials unveiled a bold plan to make Corpus Christi “drought proof.”
With this plan, a consultant explained to city officials at the time, their semi-arid stretch of coastline in South Texas could finally overcome the economic limitations of its scarce water supply.
“Industry can continue to operate,” said a slideshow the consultant, Frank Brogan, presented to Corpus Christi City Council. “Industry can justify expansion. Community can attract new industry.”
The plan seemed simple. The region’s largest water users — Texas-based titans like OxyChem, Valero and Citgo — would pay Corpus Christi to build the state’s first-ever seawater desalination plant, which would produce millions of gallons of freshwater per day at minimal cost to the public. In exchange, the companies wouldn’t face pressure to throttle back operations at their refineries and chemical plants during future dry spells.
“We don’t want to have the reputation of having a water problem,” said Brogan, a former executive at the Port of Corpus Christi, the top U.S. port for crude-oil exports, in the August 2018 presentation.
City leaders unanimously approved the plan, hailing it as a breakthrough: Giant corporations had agreed to front the money for an innovative project that other communities could only dream of affording.
But instead of securing Corpus Christi’s water future, the plan pushed Texas’ eighth-largest city to the brink of a water-supply disaster, burned through tens of millions of public dollars, and engulfed the city in political turmoil.
The city has spent at least $50 million on the promised desalination plant, but it has yet to materialize — a victim of political dysfunction, the coronavirus pandemic, rapid inflation and frequent turnover in the city’s political leadership, among other factors. And the companies that had originally agreed to pay for it now contribute only a fraction of what the plant is expected to cost. Residents would have to pay for the rest.
Meanwhile, Corpus Christi has honored the commitment it made back in 2018: It has not pressured the companies to cut back on water consumption, even when the area slipped into a punishing drought.
By this spring, the region’s main reservoirs almost dried up entirely. The industrial giants raced to drill emergency water wells, the city’s credit ratings slipped, and local business leaders raised the specter of mass layoffs if the water ran out.
In the face of an unprecedented emergency, city officials debated meager measures like closing public pools and fining residents for washing cars, rather than imposing restrictions on the chemical plants and refineries that use more water than all 500,000 residents of the seven-county Coastal Bend region combined.