One of the largest petrochemical and refining hubs along the Gulf Coast is facing its most severe water shortage in history, raising concerns among industrial and residential consumers.
Corpus Christi, Texas, has been under major drought restrictions since last December. And city water officials estimate they’ll reach a Level 1 water emergency late next year — a status triggered when the city has 180 days before water demand outstrips water supply.
That could lead to water curtailments for industrial users, which could cause some plants to shut down operations for the length of the curtailment, said Bob Paulison, executive director of the Coastal Bend Industry Association.
“Other plants that have more flexibility and can accept some curtailment for longer periods of time, they may shut down units and parts of the plant,” Paulison said. “It depends on which plants you’re talking about and how long and how much of a curtailment there is.”
A water emergency in Corpus Christi would be the first of its kind for a refining and petrochemical focal point in the region along the Gulf of Mexico, which President Donald Trump renamed the Gulf of America. The water issues are now being watched by the fossil fuel industry, water managers and residents who live in industrial areas that are increasingly prone to drought.
The Gulf Coast has the capacity to refine about 10 million barrels of crude a day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration — more than 900,000 barrels of which are processed in the Corpus Christi area as of Jan. 1.
Most of the water used to refine that oil comes from the city of Corpus Christi’s water system, which also serves more than 500,000 customers across a seven-county region in South Texas.
Large-volume water users, which mostly include petrochemical plants and refineries, used more than 1.1 billion gallons of water in September, according to the city. That was more water than residential and commercial customers used combined.
The city has waffled on a massive desalination plant that, if built, could produce up to 30 million gallons a day of fresh water. City council members voted in September against moving forward with design plans for the plant because of ballooning costs. But this month, the council voted to spend millions of dollars to secure water from a potential desalination project that would be operated by another entity.
As that plan remains in limbo, some environmental and civil groups say the growth of refining and petrochemical manufacturing in the area has imperiled drinking water supplies for people.
Jake Hernandez, a Coastal Bend field organizer with the Texas Campaign for the Environment, said the burden of curbing water use thus far has fallen more on residents than on major industrial companies.
He pointed to water use restrictions now under effect for residents — who are not allowed to wash their cars at home or water their lawns most days — versus the lack of restrictions faced by refiners and petrochemical plants.
“Industrial users get to continue to use as much water as they please, right?” Hernandez said. “What I think is really upsetting is that people are recognizing that there’s mistreatment, that there’s a difference in how we as residents are viewed in regards to where the water should go.”
‘Absolutely necessary’
Clean water is crucial to processing crude and creating petrochemicals, said Susan Bell, vice president of oil commodity markets with the Rystad Energy research firm.
Refineries use steam as a heat transfer mechanism to provide varying levels of heat to different levels of the refining process, Bell said. It’s used as a coolant throughout crude refining and petrochemical manufacturing. It’s used as a feedstock for hydrogen production and is key for the process of steam-methane reforming, which creates hydrogen out of natural gas.
Most infrastructure at refineries and chemical plants are unable to use seawater or briny water, as it could corrode pipes and machinery, Bell said. Typically, that means they draw their freshwater supplies from municipal sources or from rivers, like the Nueces River that feeds into Corpus Christi Bay, she said.
That means water cutbacks would mean companies would have to scale back their operations, Bell said.
“It’s very difficult to operate these facilities reliably if you’re under water curtailment,” Bell said. “You really do have to scale back your throughput.”
Paulison of the Coastal Bend Industry Association said that adding new technology can only happen every few years when plants shut down for maintenance.
The water problem has reached boardrooms across oil and gas companies across Texas, said Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil & Gas Association.
“A solution is absolutely necessary to avoid the drastic things that occur when you don’t have the water that’s necessary to continue the jobs and operations at these facilities,” Staples said in a recent interview. “The water conversation is literally a jobs conversation.”
But this isn’t the first time Texans have had serious conversations about water shortages.
Most of the state faced a severe drought that started in 2011 and lasted several years. By April 5, 2011, more than 95 percent of the state experienced the most severe category of drought, according to a study by the University of Texas at Austin.
In Corpus Christi, the city’s main water storage facilities — Lake Corpus Christi and the Choke Canyon Reservoir — dropped to about 44.5 percent of their capacity by August 2012, according to municipal website archives.
The drought relented in the following years. But at the same time, investment in the region’s refining and petrochemical capabilities exploded. Between 2012 and 2023, nearly $60 billion in private capital was poured into petrochemical and industrial sites around the Port of Corpus Christi, according to a recent Texas A&M University study.
Over the same time period, water usage by the manufacturing sector grew from 17.8 billion gallons a year to 23.1 billion gallons a year across the Coastal Bend region, according to the Texas Water Development Board.
‘Manufactured incident’
The two storage facilities managed by Corpus Christi Water, the city’s water provider, sat at about 11.7 percent of capacity as of Thursday, according to an online posting.
Hernandez said growth in manufacturing, which includes petrochemical production and refining, has contributed to the city’s current water crisis.
“These large industrial water users are driving this drought forward and making this sort of a manufactured incident, because our water consumption from our industrial users is so high,” Hernandez said.
But Paulison said the increases in industrial water use alone cannot explain the huge dip in output from the area’s water supply streams. When the city approved selling water to industrial users in recent years, he said, it looked like the water system could provide enough water to meet all the system’s needs.
“The point everybody is missing is even with those increases in demand, we should be well within range that our system is reliably producing enough water, but it’s not,” Paulison said. “We think based on publicly available data that the lake system is underperforming.”
Based on the current rate, city officials estimate there could be a full-blown water emergency by November 2026 — and that the city could empty its main storage facilities by April 2027.
There are no mandatory water curtailments in effect for residential or industrial users yet, said Esteban Ramos, the city of Corpus Christi’s water resource manager, in an interview. But the triggers for mandatory curtailments for industrial users changed earlier this year.
Before March, industrial users would have had to curtail their water usage if the combined levels of Lake Corpus Christi and the Choke Canyon Reservoir dipped below 30 percent. That was under the city of Corpus Christi’s old drought contingency plan.
Now, city water officials are trying to get industrial water users to cut back using economics, Ramos said. The new drought contingency plan, approved in March, increased with a drought surcharge that industrial users must pay. Once the city reaches a Level 1 water emergency, which happens when there are 180 days left of supply, Ramos said, industrial users will be charged $12 per 1,000 gallons of water they use over 12 million gallons monthly. Water managers can also begin curtailing their usage by 5 percent increments if need be.
Ramos said wielding the economic hammer usually gets more action than trying to mandate compliance with water-use reductions.
“There’s no way to get 100 percent of compliance. It’s like telling police catch 100 percent of crimes,” Ramos said. “People don’t change their habits unless things cost more.”
In a statement, Corpus Christi Mayor Paulette Guajardo said the city is working to ensure that residents and industrial users have reliable access to water now and in the future.
“We continue to explore and advance multiple immediate and long-term water supply strategies, including new infrastructure, conservation measures, and partnerships, to strengthen our system and maintain resiliency through future growth and drought cycles,” she said in response to questions from POLITICO’s E&E News.
The city council in September, however, nixed a planned desalination plant that was to provide a more drought-resistant supply of water. The council voted against moving forward with the design phase, citing costs that grew to $1.2 billion as of last month, according to KRIS 6 News.
However, the city is looking to tap a potential desalination plant that would be operated by the Nueces River Authority, voting recently to pay a nonrefundable $2.7 million fee to reserve water from the proposed facility.
City water officials are also looking into drilling more groundwater wells and finding other sources of fresh water.
Paulison said industrial users had hoped the desalination plant would alleviate water supply issues by 2028, with refiners and plants making plans to conserve water as best they could until mid-2028. Now, they’re unsure how to continue, he said.
“What happens now?” Paulison said. “We need to have a positive and productive conversation that gets us moving towards some consensus and how we can strengthen the water supply.”
