Known as the “Sparkling City by the Sea,” Corpus Christi provides water from three reservoirs supplied by the Nueces River to about 600,000 people in seven counties within the Coastal Bend region of Texas. It is also a port on the Gulf of Mexico with enormous industrial capacity that supplies much of the state’s gasoline and jet fuel.
In the coming months, Corpus Christi could become the first major U.S. city to suffer a “Day Zero Drought,” which scientists define as “a prolonged dry period that collides with growing water demand and shrinking reservoirs,” according to “Day Zero apocalypse explained” in The Economic Times. As volumes dwindle, the pressure within a supply system falls below a level sufficient to deliver water to end users. Taps run dry, commerce shuts down, and people are forced to seek water elsewhere.
Corpus Christi’s predicament has unfolded within the context of revolutionary developments in the methods available to recover oil and gas from tight shale formations found in the Eagle Ford region of South Texas and elsewhere. The resulting oil boom in the 2010s led to a push in Congress to lift the national ban on oil exports enacted in response to the oil shocks of the 1970s. The ban was lifted in late 2015 as part of a grand bargain to pass the federal budget, and the resulting growth in exports made Corpus Christi “the nation’s largest energy export gateway,” according to Port Corpus Christi’s website.
Thanks to aggressive recruiting by Corpus Christi officials, industry giants like ExxonMobil and Saudi Basic Industries Corporation soon expanded operations in the area with a plastics plant that requires 25 million gallons of water per day. Steel Dynamics established a steel mill requiring 6 million gallons a day. A lithium refinery owned by Tesla could use up to 10 million gallons per day, while Avina Clean Hydrogen “has secured rights to 5.5 million gallons per day,” according to superb reporting by Dylan Baddour in Inside Climate News. But these multibillion-dollar facilities “are built to run at a steady rate and can’t simply throttle down production in accordance with water availability,” writes Baddour. “They consume large volumes of water primarily in cooling towers to prevent excessive heating and explosions.”
Rather than meaningfully diversifying its water supplies, as cities like El Paso and San Antonio have done, Corpus Christi city staff announced plans in 2019 to build a single seawater desalination facility. Desalination uses reverse osmosis and other methods to produce freshwater by separating salt and other minerals from seawater. The resulting byproduct, known as brine, can be “nearly twice as salty as seawater because about 40-45% of the freshwater is removed,” according to Water Corporation of Western Australia, one of the world’s largest desalination plant operators.
Brine is usually released several miles offshore to allow sufficient dilution in the ocean. This prevents damage to coastal ecosystems and the industries that depend on them. But Corpus Christi’s proposal sought to release this super-salty brine into Corpus Christi Bay, “a shallow, almost stagnant body of water,” according to Baddour. Since it can take about a year for the contents of Corpus Christi Bay to be replaced by new water, scientists and activists sought to modify the plant’s design to pipe the brine a few miles offshore and release it into the deeper waters of the Gulf. But developers refused, arguing the modification would be too expensive. As opposition hardened, the project became mired in delays, and costs skyrocketed.
Mismanagement of available resources should have been evident as early as 2017, when the city had allocated all the water in its 50-year water plan about 13 years ahead of schedule, according to Baddour. Foreseeable industrial demand has continued to diminish the city’s reservoirs as drought conditions and record-high temperatures persist. Adding further uncertainty to a volatile situation, the city council voted to kill the desalination project—despite millions of dollars in previous investment—at a contentious meeting in September of last year. With no major precipitation expected, the city could find itself at an “emergency” conservation stage as early as this summer. This will require even industrial users to “steeply curtail water consumption, causing major economic disruption,” writes Baddour.
In yet another twist in this tale, Corpus Christi’s perfect storm of increased water demand, decreased water supply, and poor decision-making has developed within a rapidly destabilizing environment fueled by the state’s own emissions. With “massive concentrations of super-emitting refineries and petrochemical plants” lining the Gulf Coast, Texas is a direct contributor to “its own whipsaw weather extremes as the undisputed national leader in greenhouse gas emissions,” according to an analysis of the U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index by the investigative website Capital and Main.
James Dodson, a former director of Corpus Christi’s water department during the expansion of the city’s water supply in the 1990s, told Baddour: “It’s the very worst scenario that I’ve ever seen.” He said the city had repeatedly failed to develop groundwater import projects “as it maintained a singular and fruitless focus on desalination,” writes Baddour. The crisis was summed up best by another local water official who told Baddour: “They’ve been kicking the can down the road for a long time, and they’ve finally run out of road.”
Visit insideclimatenews.org for more on this developing story.