As reservoirs dwindle and industrial demand grows, Corpus Christi is drilling for water

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

---

This story is published in partnership with Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for the ICN newsletter here.

On the South Texas coast, the city of Corpus Christi has initiated an emergency effort to boost its water supply as local reservoirs experience a yearslong decline and water demand from big industrial projects continues to grow.

The Corpus Christi City Council approved a measure last week to begin leasing land for wells that will pump millions of gallons per day into the Nueces River, the region’s main water supply. It followed an emergency authorization memo for the project issued by the city manager on Dec. 31.

Two weeks earlier, Corpus Christi, which supplies water to 600,000 people in seven counties, enacted its strictest water use restrictions in at least 30 years, when combined levels in its two reservoirs on the Nueces River fell below 20% full after years of sparse rainfall.

“This is my fourth drought in my 43-year engineering career,” said John Michael, a senior vice president with engineering contractor Hanson Professional Services and manager for Corpus Christi’s Nueces River groundwater project, which aims to produce 20 million gallons per day by autumn. “They’re not easy. They’re high anxiety. They’re stressful.”

Drought has always been a part of life in South Texas. But in recent years, Corpus Christi has faced combined pressures of a prolonged dry spell and record-breaking heat during a period of rapid growth in its industrial sector.

City leaders initially hoped to meet the water demands of new industrial facilities with a large seawater desalination plant, which they planned to build by 2023. But the project became mired in delays and still remains years away from completion.

Meanwhile, the new industrial facilities have begun to draw water. An enormous plastics plant owned by ExxonMobil and Saudi Basic Industries Corp. uses millions of gallons per day. A lithium refinery owned by Tesla is slowly starting operations and plans to drastically increase its water consumption in coming years, according to water authority records. Another company has secured rights to millions of gallons per day of Nueces River water to produce hydrogen for export, but hasn’t yet broken ground.

Several other hydrogen plants, a carbon capture facility and a new refinery are also in development nearby. Other companies are interested in building here, too.

“There are a lot of projects that have looked at locating in South Texas, but it will be difficult until this drought is over or we have added some additional supply,” Michael said. “It’s going to be difficult to take on any big new industrial projects, other than the ones that have already started.”

Corpus Christi now hopes to build its first desalination plant by mid-2028. If the city’s reservoirs continue their rate of decline from recent years, that could be too late.

The Nueces River groundwater initiative was one of several short-term water supply projects described in an update issued by the city in January. As the two Nueces River reservoirs dwindle, crews are also hurriedly expanding a pipeline and pump stations to Corpus Christi’s third reservoir, Lake Texana, which remains 75% full but is 100 miles away. The update also said a private desalination plant built by a local plastics manufacturer, CC Polymers, will come online in 2025, and could be incorporated into the public water supply.

“It’s kind of an all-hands-on-deck thing right now,” said Perry Fowler, executive director of the Texas Water Infrastructure Network, a lobbying group based in Austin. “The water supply situation is rather serious.”

Corpus Christi isn’t alone. Across parts of south, west and central Texas, decades of rapid development and recurring drought have stretched water supplies to their limits. Official projections show some places running dry within 10 or 20 years, with few new sources of water to turn to.

That’s a major deterrent to big businesses, from microchip makers to chemical plants, that would otherwise invest in Texas.

This year, Fowler said, water planning is expected to take center stage as the Texas Legislature meets for its biennial session, with legislation in development that could make billions of dollars of state financing available to develop new sources across the state.

“Water is being viewed appropriately as an economic development issue, so I think it’s got really broad support,” Fowler said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the discussion elevated to this level.”

Real solutions, he said, will be developed over decades. In the immediate term, there isn’t much state lawmakers can do.

A gamble on desalination 

In Corpus Christi, leaders watched this situation creep up slowly. More than a year ago, the city stopped releasing reservoir water meant to support wetland ecosystems where the Nueces River meets the Gulf. But levels kept falling, from 44% full in 2023 to 31% a year ago and 19% today.

In December, the city intensified restrictions for local residents, prohibiting any outdoor water use for landscaping or car washing.

Water use restrictions, however, don’t apply to the region’s sprawling refineries and chemical plants, thanks to a purchasable exemption for industrial users passed by the City Council in 2018.

Proceeds from that exemption fee — 25 cents per 1,000 gallons consumed — were meant to fund development of the seawater desalination plant that was supposed to have been ready by 2023 to meet the demands of rapid growth in the region’s industrial sector.

When city staff members first presented their desalination plan to the city council in 2019, they displayed a graph showing large increases in water demand in 2022 and 2023, citing the Exxon-SABIC plastics plant, a new steel mill and other projects.

“A new water supply designed to meet new water demand should be in place before the new demand is consuming water,” the presentation said. “Based on supply and demand projections, the first Seawater Desalination Plant needs to be operational (supplying water) in early 2023.”

But the project stalled, mired by infighting with the Port of Corpus Christi Authority, questions over environmental impacts to Corpus Christi Bay and challenges from activists who saw water supply as a means to push back against industrial expansion in their area.

Meanwhile, in 2022, an exceptionally severe drought year, the new projects began to draw water, gradually ramping up operations. In 2023, Texas logged its hottest year on record statewide, and 2024 became the hottest on record for the South Texas region. During each of those years, levels in the Nueces River reservoirs declined.

More projects incoming 

The prospect of scarcity hasn’t deterred big companies from locating thirsty projects in the area, a long-established refinery hub with a busy commercial port.

“The majority of what are slated for our communities are large-volume water users,” said Elida Castillo, mayor pro-tem for the small city of Taft, which gets its water from Corpus Christi. “At the end of the day, they require tons of water that we do not have, and it’s all in the name of economic development.”

In nearby Robstown, Tesla is completing construction on the nation’s first large-scale lithium refinery. The facility plans to use a million gallons of water per day by October 2025 but hopes to eventually use eight million gallons per day, according to February 2024 meeting minutes from the South Texas Water Authority, a provider that buys its water from Corpus Christi.

An internal bulletin from Corpus Christi Water in April 2024 said the facility could use up to 10 million gallons per day.

Avina Clean Hydrogen, a New Jersey-based company founded in 2020, has secured rights to 5.5 million gallons per day of Nueces River water to produce hydrogen ammonia for export.

“I don’t know how they’re going to give them all those millions of gallons of water per day if we don’t have any water here,” said Myra Alaniz, a retired federal government worker who lives near the Avina site and is a member of the Tejano civic organization Chispa Texas.

Another hydrogen company has leased 2,400 acres in the nearby town of Agua Dulce, according to a December 2024 report from the Robstown Area Development Commission.

The pipeline giant Enbridge is also building a hydrogen plant in neighboring San Patricio County, which gets its water from Corpus Christi, and DRL Refineries is building an oil refinery to produce gasoline. To the south, in Kleberg County, a startup called 1PointFive plans a large facility it says will capture 30 million tons of greenhouse gases every year from the air, mix them with water and inject them underground to mitigate the effects of climate change.

By 2030, this stretch of coast will face a water shortfall of nearly 28 million gallons per day if alternate supplies are not developed, according to Texas’ latest statewide water plan, growing to 44 million gallons per day by 2070. In that time, temperatures are expected to continue rising, according to the Office of the Texas State Climatologist at Texas A&M University, driven by the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. (Texas is the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world.)

Addressing future deficits 

According to the state’s projections, Corpus Christi should be able to handle the demand if it succeeds in completing a 30 million gallon per day seawater desalination plant by 2028, as it currently projects. But it will be close, and it won’t be enough to meet future needs.

Now, the Nueces River Authority, a small public agency, is leading an effort to assemble interested parties behind plans for a gargantuan desalination facility that could meet regional water needs for a generation to come.

John Byrum, executive director of the Nueces River Authority, wrote in a September 2024 letter to the Port of Corpus Christi Authority, obtained via records request: “Current water supplies are an issue for industries wanting to locate to the Coastal Bend as well as the Nueces Basin. If the Nueces region is to realize the benefits of the high paying jobs provided by industries currently inquiring and wanting to move to the area, water sources in addition to the City of Corpus Christi’s Seawater Desalination Plant must be developed.”

Byrum proposes a desalination facility located on an island owned by the port that would initially produce 100 million gallons per day of freshwater, then scale up to 450 million gallons per day over subsequent decades — more than is currently produced from any desalination plant on earth. It would include a system of pipelines and pump stations moving vast volumes of water hundreds of miles uphill to meet the needs of cities in Central Texas.

The enormous undertaking would cost untold billions of dollars and represent one of the world’s largest water infrastructure projects, though smaller than efforts currently underway in China.

“It is a huge project, but keep in mind we’re going to phase this in,” Byrum said in an interview. “We’re looking forward to working with the Legislature this session on badly needed water supply.”

Byrum is currently gathering resolutions of interest from local towns and entities, which he hopes to use to win support from state lawmakers when they gather in Austin for this year’s legislative session.

For now, just upstream from Corpus Christi, crews work hastily on the emergency groundwater project. Several old wells along the Nueces River banks were used for this purpose during droughts of the 1980s and ’90s, but have long been abandoned.

“Investigative work is ongoing,” said a spokesperson for the Corpus Christi Water Department in a written response to questions. “This is complex work that requires time.”

The city hopes to lease the land, test and rehabilitate the wells and then build new pump stations to move groundwater into the river and downstream to users as soon as possible.

Local drought conditions are currently at stage three, “urgent.” If reservoir levels continue to decline through the summer, the city’s next step is the fourth and final stage, “emergency.” At that point, industrial users will have to steeply curtail water consumption, causing major economic disruption.

Disclosure: Exxon Mobil Corporation and Texas A&M University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.