Much of this industrial activity is clustered around (and flows through) the Port of Corpus Christi. Opened in 1926, the Port initially served as a cotton export hub shipping agricultural products out of the naturally shallow Corpus Christi Bay. Following a dredging project in the 1960’s to allow access to larger vessels, most of the Port’s traffic centered around tankers bringing in crude oil to the nearby refineries located along the Inner Harbor. The Port was humming along—perhaps short of the dream of Elihu Ropes, an East Coast land speculator who had boasted that his 1890 proposal of a deep water port in Corpus Christi would turn the city into the “Chicago of the Southwest,” but respectable nonetheless. 

The outlook for the Port of Corpus Christi would change drastically in the waning  days of 2015. Decades prior, Congress had banned exports of crude oil in 1975 due to concerns emerging from the OPEC oil embargo. In December of 2015, the Republican-controlled House and Senate repealed this ban, turning forty years of American fossil fuel policy on its head. 

The timing coincided with the shale oil boom, which played a key role in kick-starting a massive corporate lobbying campaign to build support for lifting the ban. Even House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi hailed the policy at the time as a “victory”, citing key environmental goals Democratic legislators voting in favor of the deal had secured. 

All those broken records have led the Port of Corpus Christi to stand alone as the largest port for oil exports in the  United States.

Regardless of whatever the movement to combat climate change may or may not have won from this deal, there were other clear winners. Among them was the Port of Corpus Christi, which set its sights on becoming the “Energy Port of the Americas” and has largely lived up to that moniker. The Port set new export records for crude oil every year for six years since the December 2015 decision to lift the ban, and is set to do the same in 2023. All those broken records have led the Port of Corpus Christi to stand alone as the largest port for oil exports in the  United States.

This growth would come with a cost. Many of the booming industries around the Port were deeply water-intensive, and needed reliable sources of freshwater. As a result, at the same time that the local water boil notices were drawing the attention of Coastal Bend residents, industry was setting its sights on water access as well. 

By November of 2016, the repeated water boils of the past twelve months had put water security front-of-mind for understandably frustrated Corpus residents. The city manager’s resignation had come in the wake of the third water boil, five months before voters would decide whether to send incumbent Mayor Nelda Martinez back for a third two-year term. Martinez was a nine-year veteran of city politics who had previously served as an at-large city councilmember prior to her election as mayor in 2012. Despite winning reelection by more than 20 percentage points in 2014, by 2016 she had become, in the eyes of many voters, the face of bureaucratic ineptitude. 

Clearly the system was broken, the establishment unable or unwilling to make the investments needed to provide basic civic services. In response, voters ousted Martinez in favor of “political outsider” Dan McQueen. McQueen’s election would not bring immediate water peace, however. As though to underscore the severity of the underlying problem, the Mayor McQueen era began with the water ban the day after he was sworn in. 

This water issue was the most serious yet, caused by industrial contamination. While McQueen could hardly be blamed for a water ban so early in his tenure, his bid to shake up the halls of power would ultimately fall short for other reasons. Just thirty-seven days into his term—thirty-seven days marred by charges of falsified degrees, unpaid taxes, nepotism, and bizarre online rants—McQueen announced his resignation as Mayor of Corpus Christi via Facebook. A special election that May would bring in new Mayor Joe McComb, a political veteran and businessman. Yet despite the political theater of McQueen’s lightning-quick mayoral term, concerns over water remained at the forefront in Corpus Christi.  

It was in this environment that the campaign to invest in water generation via seawater desalination first gained local prominence. Despite the fact that the water boils had been the result of failing infrastructure and industrial accidents, the conversation turned quickly to water availability. This topic change was no accident; time would show that it was largely a corporate bait-and-switch to secure water for industry.

From the Texas Tribune & Shalonn Simmons

Today, Corpus’ municipal water comes from four sources: nearby Lake Corpus Christi, the Choke Canyon reservoir system, the Colorado River, and Lake Texana, the latter two of which send their water south to Corpus via the Mary Rhodes pipeline. These four sources are then redirected by Corpus Christi Water (CCW) to nearly half a million citizens across seven counties. 

Of course, not all of CCW’s water goes to individual use. In 2017, residential customers represented 36 percent of the raw water demand. But recent years, with the explosion of industrial investment following the repeal of the crude oil export ban, have seen industrial water needs soar as well. Some estimates place the current industry demand in the range of 60 to 80 percent of the total water supply, with the increase largely driven by a handful of massive new industrial projects. 

As a result of these commitments, Corpus would use up the final thirteen years of its 50-year water supply plan virtually overnight. Over a decade’s worth of water, siphoned off by industry. 

In many cases, these new projects were enticed to locate in the Coastal Bend via promises that the City of Corpus Christi would meet their water needs. Under Mayor McComb in 2018, the City promised six million gallons a day to Steel Dynamics, a steel plant. The year prior, they had assured ExxonMobil they would have ample water—twenty-five million gallons per day, at peak production—to build a plastics-producing facility. As a result of these commitments, Corpus would use up the final thirteen years of its 50-year water supply plan virtually overnight. Over a decade’s worth of water, siphoned off by industry. 

Meanwhile, the City of Corpus Christi had been under prolonged drought advisories in 2015 before loosening the drought contingency plan in 2017. At the time, Mayor McComb stated that the old standards gave the impression that the city was water-poor. He pointed to the construction of the Exxon plant as evidence that this was a false belief. 

“You can never have too much water, but we have enough now to attract development and keep our lawns and parks green,” McComb said.

Despite the looser drought standards, Corpus Christi has been under Stage 1 drought restrictions since June of 2022, and anticipates Stage 2 restrictions becoming necessary in December of 2023.

Residents found violating Stage 1 water use restrictions can face up to $500 in fines per day. During these restrictions, current Mayor Paulette Guajardo spoke publicly and urged her constituents to conserve water, stating that residents should “feel guilty” while brushing their teeth. While water conservation is certainly an important goal, citizens could be forgiven for feeling the advice rings hollow when industry up the road has a virtual free pass to use millions of gallons a day.  

Despite Mayor McComb’s claims the city had enough water, the implicit belief by city officials was that their massive water promises required investments in water desalination as a new regional source of freshwater. McComb was an early advocate for desalination investments. Mayor Guajardo has continued to champion the cause. But as concerns and delays with desal mount, residents are understandably worried what might happen if these promises conflict with household water needs. Whose interests would the City prioritize: industry’s or citizens’?

For the Greater Good is a community group which formed in the wake of the water boil notices, determined to organize and force the city to address these issues which were disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable members of the community. Dr. Isabel Araiza, a professor at  Del Mar College, was a co-founder of the group, which began by learning about city water infrastructure at the local library. There, they formed a small grassroots group studying the history of the region. The takeaway?

“Centering industry has always been a part of our city’s history, at least since the early 1900’s. Before that, it was ranching driving the city. But people’s needs have never been centered, it’s been industry that drives priorities and decisions,” says Dr. Araiza. Learning eventually morphed into action, and the group began attending city hall meetings to speak out and offer public comment.

“Centering industry has always been a part of our city’s history, at least since the early 1900’s. Before that, it was ranching driving the city. But people’s needs have never been centered, it’s been industry that drives priorities and decisions.”

The problem of Corpus’ municipal water supply was not only drawing attention locally. After the third water boil, in 2016, Dr. Araiza and For the Greater Good members attended a meeting hosted by “H2O Texas” at a downtown convention center. But during the talk, it became clear quickly that this group had not come to help out of the goodness of their heart. They were there to push desalination. 

“They were saying we need a drought resistant water supply,” Dr. Araiza recalls. “But I remember looking at the graph they were showing and thinking, ‘Gosh, that population projection is actually pretty flat’”

Desalination (or “desal”) is the process by which water too high in salinity for human uses can be made potable. On average, seawater contains roughly seventy times the level of dissolved salts for water to be considered potable. Modern desal plants use a process called reverse osmosis to produce freshwater; while more efficient than the old “flash-distillation” method, reverse osmosis is still incredibly energy-intensive. 

All those removed salts have to go somewhere: desal produces briny effluent as a waste product. A typical 42-to-58 freshwater-to-brine ratio means that effluent is actually the primary product by volume of reverse osmosis desalination. Generally, that wastewater is dumped back into the body of water it was drawn from. 

Over time, the discharge of high-salinity effluent raises the surrounding water’s salinity. As the salinity increases, successive attempts to desalinate water from the intake body get progressively more difficult as the body of water approaches “peak salt.” 

Today, desal provides much of the water needed for the arid nations of the Arabian Gulf. The prevalence of the practice had led the shallow, slow moving body of water to be about twenty-five percent saltier than normal seawater. As a result, the Arabian Gulf is one of the most adversely affected marine environments in the world, with discharge from desal contributing to the formation of massive dead zones and the loss of up to seventy percent of the Gulf’s coral reefs. Opponents to desal in the Coastal Bend worry that the technology will bring similar ecological ruin to their waters.

The proposed desal plants in Corpus would actually produce more brine than the standard reverse osmosis plant. The plants would have a combined intake of 317 billion gallons per year and discharge 213 billion gallons of effluent, for a ratio of freshwater-to-brine of around 33-to-67. With two-thirds of the water coming into the plants being dumped back out as brine, the effects on the local ecosystem could be severe. 

Experts have raised serious concerns about the environmental impact of that brine. The change in salinity could devastate populations of redfish and sea trout, two species with incredible commercial value to the region and residents’ livelihoods. The Corpus Christi Bay is also shallow—around eleven feet deep on average—and slow-recirculating, taking over a year to cycle in new water from the Gulf of Mexico. These factors increase the risks that the effluent from desal poses to the whole Bay ecosystem. 

The five proposed desal plants have been put forward by three entities: the City and Port of Corpus Christi each have two and the fifth belongs to Corpus Christi Polymers, a plastics producer. Corpus Christi Polymers’ desal plant is already built and permitted, but is smaller than the other four, with a capacity of five million gallons per day (MGD). 

The City has proposed a 10-30 MGD plant in the Inner Harbor, and a 20-40 MGD plant across the Bay in the La Quinta channel. The Port is seeking to build a second La Quinta plant with a capacity of 30 MGD in addition to a 50 MGD plant on Harbor Island.

Construction of these plants requires regulatory approval from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Largely supportive of the projects, TCEQ has granted permits to the Port and City on separate occasions. While the EPA intervened in early 2023 to halt the process for the Port’s Harbor Island desal plant, citing concerns related to the Clean Water Act, on December 12, 2023 the City received the second of two required permits from TCEQ to move forward with its Inner Harbor desal plant. While thus far unscheduled, the next step will be the scheduling of a public meeting over the draft permit before final approval.

Graphic by Chase Rogers & Corpus Christi Caller Times

Jim Klein is a professor of history at Del Mar College and president of the Coastal Bend Sierra Club. Klein first ran unsuccessfully for a City Council seat in 2020 before winning election as councilmember at-large in 2022, representing the whole city. He says that he was inspired to run to combat the longstanding failures of city government to respond to its citizens’ needs over special interests, and out of concerns over the desal push specifically. His experience has shown him just how much special access to City Hall is granted to business interests.

One such example of privilege granted to industry Klein identified was the water rates that industrial users paid for thirty years prior to 2022. 

“Industries in the area had been paying less than half as much for water as residents had been. They’d been paying $1.95 per thousand gallons, and residents were paying $5.08 per thousand gallons of water.”

“That went on for thirty years . . . . How many people on a fixed income in the 2000’s or the 1990’s were making hard decisions about ‘Do I pay the water bill this month, or do I buy groceries this month?’”

Throughout that period, he argues, Corpus Christi residents were effectively subsidizing industry. While the water rate paid by industry has increased since 2021, Councilmember Klein says it is still not equitable. Today, industry pays significantly less than residential water users. 

“That went on for thirty years,” he points out. “How many people on a fixed income in the 2000’s or the 1990’s were making hard decisions about ‘Do I pay the water bill this month, or do I buy groceries this month?’… Those kinds of decisions have really been in place behind closed doors for decades.”

In many ways, the recent conflict over water is merely a continuation of a local trend that has long persisted. Just as citizens subsidized industrial water rates in the decades prior to 2022, activists fear that the costs of desal will be borne by the community while industry reaps the gains. These groups contend that the business model of the Coastal Bend’s extractive industries is an all-encompassing mindset: they extract fuels from the ground, water from the sea, and surplus value from the community.

Elida Castillo is the Program Director of Chispa Texas, a Latine grassroots organizing program within the League of Conservation Voters. She grew up just outside of Corpus in Taft, Texas, and says she saw firsthand the heavy price industry extracts from her community. With several generations of her family employed at Coastal Bend industrial facilities, Castillo recalls loved ones who suffered severe burns, dealt with asbestos exposure, and were lost in the 2005 British Petroleum refinery explosion in nearby Texas City. 

Castillo sees the costs and benefits of industrial investments as geographically segregated. Some areas are home to communities which receive the astronomical costs, while the benefits go to much less populous and more affluent areas. 

“There are communities that live along these refineries that bear the brunt of the impacts of the pollution, of the VOCs (volatile organic compounds) that they’re breathing in… and these officials that feel like we need more of this growth never go and talk to these community members and say ‘How do you feel about this?’”

To see where this is going, says Dr. Araiza, one need only look at the way Corpus has treated one of its most underserved neighborhoods. 

“What they did to the Hillcrest area along Refinery Row, now they’re doing to the entire region. We’re collateral damage to continue the status quo, and the status quo isn’t good for anyone.” 

Hillcrest is a neighborhood located along the Inner Harbor, near what is today known as “Refinery Row” due to the heavy concentration of industrial facilities in the narrow strip of land. Prior to the mid 20th century, Hillcrest was the domain of Corpus’ rich and powerful. The exclusively white community had a swanky country club, stunning views of Nueces and Corpus Christi bays, and strict Jim Crow era racial deed-restrictions. 

That all changed when oil was discovered in Nueces County. Suddenly, the sleepy little port near Hillcrest had new, non-agricultural clients, and refineries quickly dotted the surrounding land. The change prompted Corpus to reconsider its housing policies, and in 1944, the City opened Hillcrest to Black residents. 

Hillcrest and nearby Washington-Coles underwent rapid demographic changes as wealthy white residents fled inland away from the growing sprawl of industry. The succeeding decades would bring the consequences of industrialization to the now majority Black and Latine low-income community. Exposure to unsafe levels of air pollution and carcinogenic industrial toxins are today a part of life in the neighborhood which is among the lowest in Nueces County for life expectancy and among the highest in infant mortality.

It wasn’t just industrial neighbors that failed Hillcrest and Washington-Coles, but officials ostensibly elected to represent them as well. When Interstate 37 was constructed, it cut the area off from the rest of the city. Community organizers had to file a lawsuit under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to prevent the City from siting a wastewater treatment plant in their backyard. And when the City and the Port decided to build a new Harbor Bridge over the ship channel, it was decided that the new highway would run through the neighborhood. It took grassroots mobilization from community leaders like the late Pastor Adam Carrington and another threatened lawsuit before the Port agreed to pay relocation costs for displaced residents. 

Now, Hillcrest is adjacent to the City’s proposed Inner Harbor desal plant. Residents, with support from the legal nonprofit EarthJustice, have filed another Title VI complaint in response. Pastor Carrington spoke out against the City’s desal plan during the filing of the suit. 

“The City of Corpus Christi has proven over and over again that it values profits over Hillcrest residents’ health and quality of life,” said Carrington. “The city is sacrificing Hillcrest yet again to support industry’s need for additional water and we call on the federal agencies to stop this latest injustice.”

The Department of Housing and Urban Development opened an investigation in response to the complaint. While that investigation is still pending at the time of publication, the City is still moving forward on the plant. 

Corpus Christi City Council voted 6-3 on January 30th of this year to accept loans from the Texas Water Development Board and begin construction on the Inner Harbor plant. Councilmembers Klein and Sylvia Campos voted against the proposal; one other member abstained. Despite vigorous protest from community members during public comment, Mayor Guajardo again echoed the idea that desal was necessary to secure a long-term community water supply. In response to charges that the Inner Harbor site would further environmental racism and bring lasting ecological harms, city officials claimed the facility would “state of the art technology with aesthetically-pleasing buildings that will enhance the neighborhood.”

Port Commissioner David Engel was quoted at the time of the January 30th vote speaking in favor of the necessity to further regional economic development. This is a familiar refrain from pro-industry groups in Corpus. Opponents of development, they claim, are luddites who stand in the way of prosperity. This framing channels the “economic development” debate into a “do-or-don’t” false dichotomy and obfuscates the political choices made on which industries are developed, and how, and where, and who shares in the benefits. It also ignores the legitimate concerns that residents in opposition to unfettered “development” have, concerns often informed by decades of experience of living around industrial sites. 

In the Corpus area alone, tax abatements for industry have amounted to $2.47 billion in lost revenue.

One presentation made by a communications firm hired to promote the Gulf Coast Growth Ventures project listed potential challenges to the project. Among the challenges considered were “NIMBYism”. NIMBY, which stands for “Not In My Back Yard”, has most commonly been used as a critique against privileged residents who use their political leverage to prevent the location of affordable housing projects in their area for fear they will cause property values to fall. Here though, Harris DeVille & Associates were using the phrase to describe residents who had health, environmental, or water-use concerns about siting a massive industrial plant in their community. 

Despite assertions that all this industrial growth is good for the region, Dr. Araiza sees reason for skepticism. 

“We’ve used their own reports to show their claims [of job creation] are false,” she says, pointing out that these industries simply are not “job growth” sectors. Meanwhile, the companies use various tax abatement programs to avoid the payment of fairly assessed taxes to public entities. In the Corpus area alone, tax abatements for industry have amounted to $2.47 billion in lost revenue.

City Councilmember Klein also points out that even nebulous claims about the positive economic externalities of industrial growth for the region are questionable. 

“If the six refineries…and all the chemical industries that we’ve got in the area are really benefiting the general public, why is more than two-thirds of our population classified as underserved?… The industries have not just been here for the last four or five months, they’ve been here for seven or eight decades already.” 

Pro-industry officials may point to all the philanthropy that large corporations engage in as one reason they benefit the region. Through their “Good Neighbors” programs, many of these industries give substantial sums to community non-profits or to fund educational programs in local schools. 

But Elida Castillo says that this practice is simply industry investing some of the money they save in taxes in order to capture more local power.

“If they just paid their fair share in taxes, they wouldn’t need to give these donations, and then it’s just another write-off for them.”

Castillo argues those donations buy more than just write-offs, though. 

“When you go to some of these permit hearings, the ones who show up in favor of some of these [industrial emission permits] are the food banks… and they’ll say ‘Yeah, they’re good for us, because they gave us this money’.” 

All in all, community activists feel they have identified a broad-based attempt by industry to capture the Coastal Bend and extract as much value from it as possible. The desal fight, then, is just another attempt to deplete the area for profit, and one they are rallying against. Motivated by a deep love for their home, these organizers feel that a better world is possible around the Corpus Christi Bay. 

“People wouldn’t need to escape Corpus,” Dr. Araiza says of her and her allies’ vision for the future. 

“Corpus could be the escape.”