Story #1: Texas’ Refusal to Plan for Climate Change Created a Crisis in Corpus Christi.
A decade ago, Corpus Christi’s regional water plan projected shortages as soon as 2050. The next plan, released five years later, shortened that timeline to 2030.
The next plan, released this year, said shortages were imminent, putting city leaders in a desperate scramble to avoid an emergency.
Something’s not right with the calculations that underpin these plans, said John Michael, an engineering executive who has worked on local water infrastructure for 44 years.
“Whether it’s climate change or something else, our reservoir system is not as dependable as we once thought,” he said at his office in May.
He pointed to the regional water plans on his office table—700 pages in four-inch binders—which are prepared every five years by local committees using methodology provided by the State of Texas. These plans never factored in climate science or considered the projections that a warming planet could contribute to a drought as extreme as the one Corpus Christi now faces.
In fact, as climate models predicted, every drought for the last 30 years in Corpus Christi has exceeded the parameters contemplated in local plans, thanks to fatal delusions deep in the heart of Texas’ methodology: Texas doesn’t plan for droughts to get worse.
“The droughts keep getting worse,” said Michael, vice president of Hanson Professional Services in Corpus Christi.
Four droughts have punctuated his career, each hotter and drier than the last. Each one left the city scrambling to build out its water plans ahead of schedule. For decades, intensifying droughts consistently outpaced planning efforts until, by the start of this drought, the region ran out of plans.
The problem is that methods developed by the Texas Water Development Board, an agency headed by appointees of the governor, use the worst drought conditions on record as a worst-case scenario for the future.
“Drought‑of‑record planning is a foundational element of Texas water planning,” said a TWDB spokesperson, Kaci Woodrome. “It provides a consistent, statewide minimum baseline for evaluating water supply reliability.”
The TWDB guides water planning processes for 16 regions in Texas, some of which plan for conditions worse than the drought of record, Woodrome said. It is well known that droughts worse than the drought-of-record can occur, she said. Climate scientists have concluded that the Earth’s warming atmosphere has made droughts worse over the past 25 years and will continue to do so over the next 25.
But that isn’t reflected in Texas’ water plans. “Climate-related projections are not something that any of Texas’ state water plans have included,” Woodrome said, referring questions about climate to the Office of the State Climatologist.
“The majority of factors point toward increased drought severity,” said an assessment of weather trends by the climatologist’s office in 2024, Corpus Christi’s hottest year on record. “Future rainfall deficits comparable to those earlier in the 20th century will have greater impacts due to higher temperatures.”
The region’s 2026 water plan, released in January, “explicitly recognized that, in the event of a repeat of the drought of record, the City of Corpus Christi, as a major water provider, was already facing an immediate shortage,” Woodrome said.
She added: “Such a shortage might increase if a new drought of record were to occur,” which is exactly what happened.
By early this year, officials suspected that drought conditions in Corpus Christi had again surpassed the worst on record. The city’s models never indicated the reservoirs would get this low, said Corpus City Manager Peter Zanoni. But the models didn’t consider the possibility, or the science describing the likelihood, of a drought as severe as the region now faces.
“We based it on the last drought-of-record,” Zanoni said. “This is the worst one yet.”
[…]
“The water plan has to be realistic,” said Larry Soward, a former executive director of the Texas Water Commission. “If you seriously looked at climate change, it would say: We can’t grow anymore unless we make some major changes.”
Political leaders in Texas have intentionally ignored this reality for decades, said Soward, who spent 35 years in state government. Acknowledging the risks of climate change would disrupt their economic agenda, Soward said, and interfere with the growth of business and industry.
Soward witnessed Texas’ irrepressible growth as an attorney for the Water Quality Board in the 1970s, director of the Texas Water Commission in the 1980s and in the 1990s as special counsel on water for the Texas Department of Agriculture. During that time, the state built its last reservoirs but failed to devise a subsequent strategy, Soward said. So Texas kept growing, but its water supply didn’t.
“There’s been a real lack of leadership,” he said. “Especially at the state level.”
Climate change and the current water crisis in Corpus Christi, for which the start date has been pushed back into 2027 thanks to the recent rains, are not likely to be high on anyone’s issues priority list this year. But they still fit into the message that I’ve been suggesting, which is that everything that is a problem in Texas today is the Republicans’ fault. That’s partly because they have bad policies, and partly because they’ve been in charge for 25 years, longer than that at the statewide level. Anything they say needs fixing is something they could have started fixing before now or something they could have prevented or at least made less bad, but didn’t. They don’t get to run away from anything, and we can’t let them. Whatever it is, they own it.
Story #2: How a Tiny Texas River Agency Plans to Build the Largest Desalination Plant in the Country.
Something moved John Byrum. He believed he could succeed where others had not.
The executive director of the Nueces River Authority (NRA)—a small, rural agency based 200 miles from the coast—decided to take up the banner, in 2024, of a desalination plant on Corpus Christi Bay.
Plans to build seawater desalination plants had floundered for years near Corpus Christi, which provides water to a major complex of chemical plants and refineries, and the likelihood of water shortages was growing.
“Texas needed a sustainable supply of water in that area to protect the industry,” said Byrum, a veteran water manager with silver hair and a charming drawl. “This was the way to do it.”
The Port of Corpus Christi never secured financing for the multi-billion-dollar project, so Byrum would fund it one piece at a time. He took up collection, not from the region’s large industrial water users like ExxonMobil, OxyChemical and Valero, but from small towns and rural utilities in the hinterlands of San Antonio, 150 miles from the coast, that could theoretically be connected by pipeline to the desalination plant, according to records obtained by Inside Climate News.
The agency collected $6.4 million from 18 cities, towns and utilities since March of last year, records show, while it doled out lobbying and engineering contracts for the Harbor Island desalination project near Corpus Christi.
Executives collected money from as far away as the city of Kyle, south of Austin, where NRA’s chief operating officer at the time presented the City Council in October with plans to build the enormous pipeline from the coast by 2032, and an opportunity to reserve some of its water.
“We’re actually 90 percent sold out now,” Travis Pruski, the official, told the City Council. “You would buy the last 10 percent of the water.”
However, records show, Kyle bought the water, but Pruski didn’t stop selling. The agency continued to sell reservations for five months after Kyle paid its $500,000 deposit. In fact, the water was never sold out, records show.
Pruski resigned from the NRA in May, after alleging that Byrum misrepresented financial figures to Corpus Christi’s City Council and the agency’s board members. Byrum denies that and continues his work to build the desalination plant.
Pruski, a career fundraising professional and former mayor of the small town of Poth, declined to comment on the specifics of his time with the NRA or the allegations in his resignation letter.
“I’m not really wanting to talk about that right now,” he said. “I’ve kind of moved on with my life.”
In May, Byrum’s NRA announced a partnership with Israeli desalination giant IDE Technologies, which described the Harbor Island plant as the largest seawater desalination project in the Western Hemisphere.
First outlined in 2017 by the Port of Corpus Christi, plans for Harbor Island stalled amid feuding with the city government and its competing desalination project.
Later, the little NRA faced steep skepticism over its wherewithal to take on such an enormous endeavor.
Now, the partnership with IDE, a global leader in seawater desalination, marks the strongest sign yet that the landmark project could become a reality. It also means future Texans might pay a foreign company for water.
Everything about this is insane. I can’t do it justice, you have to keep reading. I’m rooting for them to somehow pull this off, just to see how it would work.