Corpus Christi sold its water to Exxon and is losing its big bet on desalination
I hesitated to post this story, mostly because I've just been so overloaded with bad news. I wasn't even aware of this situation. Here we would have had Texas' first big desalination plant, planned for Corpus Christi, back in 2017! And the plans are far from even being drawn up. It was supposed to be operational in 2023 to supply water to new industry, not the people. Now some of the new industrial plants are online, and where is the water Corpus promised them?
California has built several desalination plants on its coast, and they dump the hyper-briny product miles out in the Pacific, but in Corpus, it's "too expensive" to dump it far out in the Gulf of Mexico. They want to dump it in the bays in the area, where already much of the sea life has disappeared.
It's just shit after shit. Another clusterfuck and an example of heavy industry killing another region of the earth. But, knowledge is better than ignorance, no matter how disturbing the knowledge may be, so...
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, 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.
Snip
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 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.
(It's a long story)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/corpus-christi-sold-its-water-to-exxon-and-is-losing-its-big-bet-on-desalination/amp/