Could be sooner, could be later. Pick your projection.
Corpus Christi leaders on Tuesday unveiled new projections suggesting that the city could be just two months away from triggering emergency water measures.
At a marathon city council meeting that stretched for 10 hours, Nick Winkelmann, interim chief operating officer of Corpus Christi Water, outlined five potential scenarios — two of which would push the city into a level one water emergency by May. At that point, the city’s water supply would be projected to fall short of demand within 180 days.
When pressed by council member Kaylynn Paxson on which scenario the city is preparing to follow, staffers at the water utility said they expect to narrow the possibilities down to two or three in the coming weeks as more data becomes available.
Meanwhile, Gov. Greg Abbott — who sharply criticized Corpus Christi leaders for their handling of the crisis recently — has ordered agencies to suspend normal procedures in an effort to buy the city more time.
Complicating the outlook are bleak seasonal forecasts. Projections from the National Weather Service show little to no rainfall expected between July and September, limiting inflows to key reservoirs that supply the city, including Choke Canyon, Lake Corpus Christi and Lake Texana.
Despite the mounting concerns, the city has not finalized a curtailment plan that would lay out how much — and how soon — residents and businesses would have to reduce their water use.
“If we get to the point where we have to declare a level one water emergency, we need to be ready for that and we have no precedent to follow and we have no there’s no manual, there’s no video, there’s no, ‘This is how we did it the last time,’ ” City Manager Peter Zanoni told the council, adding that a curtailment plan could take weeks or months to finalize and implement.
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The city recently boosted production from its primary water pipeline that pulls from Lake Texana and the Colorado River, increasing capacity by 24 million gallons per day, even as a deepening drought threatens to cut off that extra water.
Under the drought plan for the Lavaca-Navidad River Authority, which operates the lake, when the lake reaches 50% capacity, the agency must reduce customers’ water supply by 10%. The reservoir is currently at 54% of capacity.
The governor’s office Friday ordered the river authority to change that trigger point to 40% to guarantee more water to the city. The authority is meeting on Wednesday to make that change, according to the governor’s office.
Meanwhile, several major water infrastructure projects remain months or even years away from completion, leaving a critical gap as water demand continues to climb.
To close that gap, the city has turned to drilling wells in two fields in rural Nueces County that are expected to produce up to 26 million gallons daily once fully operational. One field is completed and another has some wells ready to operate soon, but is awaiting a permit from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Corpus Christi officials say the delays could push the city toward a water emergency sooner.
“The only thing holding us up is a piece of paper,” Zanoni, the city manager, said at a Friday press conference.
On Friday, Abbott directed the TCEQ to fast-track temporary permits and loosen certain regulatory requirements to accelerate the city’s drilling projects.
“Corpus Christi is an important economic driver not only for Texas but also the nation,” said Andrew Mahaleris, the governor’s press secretary. “The State of Texas is committing significant investments to ensure Corpus Christi has the water resources it needs to serve citizens. The Governor is further stepping in and has waived regulations to ensure TCEQ can issue temporary permits on an expedited basis — while still preserving public input.”
TCEQ did not immediately comment on whether those permits have been issued.
During Tuesday’s meeting, the council also voted to accelerate the second well drilling project — despite not yet having the permits needed to pump.
The Evangeline groundwater project would include 24 wells and is projected to produce about 24 million gallons of water per day from neighboring San Patricio County. It could be finished by 2028, according to a city memo.
“We’re taking a calculated risk and continuing the design and we’re going to build,” Zanoni told council members. “We’re going to start building the project in about five weeks, without the permits, without the drilling permits.”
Officials say the design for the project is about 60% complete and the wells could deliver roughly 4 million gallons of water per day by November, though that timeline depends heavily on when the city receives permits to start pumping.
See here and here for the background. That Evangeline project may face legal challenges, and of course 2028 may be a bit late for the oncoming disaster. Inside Climate News adds some details.
The city is currently drawing most of its water from Lake Texana, 100 miles to its northeast, where rules by the Lavaca-Navidad River Authority stipulate a 10 percent reduction in Corpus Christi’s draw when the lake falls below 50 percent full, which authorities expect to happen in April.
On Monday Abbott “directed the LNRA to ensure Corpus Christi water is not curtailed in the near term,” Mahaleris said in his statement on Tuesday.
Abbott directed the agency to move its curtailment threshold to the point at which Lake Texana reaches 40 percent “to further protect residents as the city forms long-term solutions,” Mahaleris said. Instead of cutting Corpus Christi’s water 10 percent when Texana hits 50 percent, the Lavaca-Navidad River Authority would cut the city’s water by 20 percent when Texana hits 40 percent, general manager Patrick Brzozowski told Inside Climate News in an interview at the agency office on Monday.
Abbott’s order would in effect delay implementation of water curtailment, but result in twice as much water loss if the reservoir recedes to 40 percent capacity. That would buy Corpus Christi another month to bring new water supplies online before much larger forced cuts of water demand would take effect.
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Most of the region’s water supply goes to industrial users, including chemical plants and refineries that produce jet fuel for Texas airports as well as gasoline for the state. The region’s largest water consumer is a plastics plant operated by ExxonMobil and the Saudi state oil company, which opened in 2022.
Now Corpus Christi is racing to develop the emergency water wellfields before its supplies run short. Those clusters of wells, which the city started in 2025, will pump groundwater into the Nueces River to boost water levels in Lake Corpus Christi.
At current production levels of 4 MGD, those wells won’t prevent the city from entering a water emergency in May, according to city modeling presented Tuesday.
If those wells produce 10 MGD by April, it still might not prevent the city from entering a water emergency in May. If the wells boost production and secure additional permitting by April, it could push the emergency to October.
If, in addition to those conditions, the city receives permits for its Evangeline groundwater import project and it starts producing 4 MGD in November, the city could avoid an emergency altogether.
The city also reported progress on its seawater desalination project and wastewater reuse project. It said containerized brackish water treatment plants could produce 4 MGD in 11 months or 21 MGD in two years. It did not present detailed plans for what to do in the case of an emergency.
The city should be making plans to reduce its current water use, including by industrial water users, according to Todd Votteler, a veteran South Texas water manager and editor in chief of the Texas Water Journal.
“Restricting current use is really the best short-term option,” Votteler, a former executive manager for the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, told Inside Climate News. “While the ongoing debate over seawater desalination and other prospective water supplies is important, it is ultimately not relevant to addressing the current water crisis.”
Here’s a more recent update, in which some new water supplies have come online for Corpus Christi and thus reducing the immediate burden. But with all of it there’s a bit of robbing Peter to pay Paul, which I can understand in an emergency, but which runs the risk of expanding the crisis to the places that depend on the sources that Corpus will be borrowing from. And yeah, there’s the matter of the big industrial users.
This story from 2022 was an early warning.
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.
That hasn’t stopped the city and its port authority from pursuing broader plans to build out a next-generation industrial sector around Corpus Christi Bay and make this region a rival to Houston, home to the nation’s largest petrochemical complex, 200 miles up the Gulf Coast.
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.
I dunno, maybe forcing those guys to do something would be a good idea? It’s sure not what we’re doing now. I’m sure Greg Abbott can come up with some suggestions, when he’s not busy presiding over Corpus’ City Council meetings.
