Corpus Christi sold its water to Exxon and is losing its big bet on desalination
This story has a lot of facets to it. A failed attempt at a desalination plant, drought, water crisis, heavy industry fucking things up, a dead shrimp and oyster industry, stupid politicians, greedy corporations, LNG. It's kind of a long story, and more "bad news" on top of everything else. To me, it's another good reason to refuse any LNG plants in the Rio Grande Valley. Elon Musk wants to build one to supply his rockets at Boca Chica.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/corpus-christi-sold-its-water-to-exxon-and-is-losing-its-big-bet-on-desalination/amp/
Corpus Christi sold its water to Exxon and is losing its big bet on desalination
ArsTechnica
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas—Five years ago, when ExxonMobil came calling, city officials eagerly signed over a large portion of their water supply so the oil giant could build a $10 billion plant to make plastics out of methane gas. A year later, they did the same for Steel Dynamics to build a rolled-steel factory.
Never mind that Corpus Christi, a mid-sized city on the semi-arid South Texas coast, had just raced through its 50-year water plan 13 years ahead of schedule. Planners believed they had a solution: large-scale seawater desalination. According to the plan in 2019, the state’s first plant needed to be running by early 2023 to safely meet industrial water demands that were scheduled to come online. But Corpus Christi never got it done.
As efforts to cut carbon emissions fall desperately behind the timetables established in decades of global climate accords, Corpus Christi is planning a massive expansion of its hydrocarbon sector, aimed at delivering oil and gas from Texas’ shale fields to global markets for decades to come. All that’s missing is the freshwater. Now the commitments city officials made over the past five years are coming due. Exxon’s plastic plant started operations this year and will eventually consume 25 million gallons of water per day, even as the region’s water plan foresees demand exceeding supplies in this decade.
This summer, severe drought and heat pushed Corpus Christi into water use restrictions. Yet the desalination plans remained years away from completion, hung up on questions from state and federal environmental regulators—the (pro-business) Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the US Environmental Protection Agency—over the ecological consequences of dumping hundreds of millions of gallons of salty brine per day into Corpus Christi Bay.
much more at link, if you have the stomach for it.
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