Corpus Christi City Council voted 7–1 on March 24 to begin formal negotiations with Aquatech to purchase drinking water from a privately owned desalination plant under construction at Corpus Christi Polymers, a plastics manufacturer in Nueces County — a move driven by reservoir levels that have collapsed to 8.4% of capacity and the prospect of a city-wide water emergency as early as May.
The stakes are not abstract. Corpus Christi is the eighth-largest city in Texas, and its water system serves roughly 500,000 people across seven counties, along with one of the nation's densest petrochemical corridors and the Port of Corpus Christi — the country's top crude oil export terminal. More than 95% of the city's supply comes from surface water, primarily reservoirs now being drained by a drought of historic severity. Industrial demand compounds the pressure: a single ExxonMobil plastics plant consumed nearly 5,000,000,000 gallons of city water in 2024 alone, a figure that stands in stark relief against the residential restrictions now in force. The convergence of industrial thirst, climate-driven drought, and infrastructure decisions deferred for years has produced a crisis with very little margin.
The Aquatech plant, built on land owned by Corpus Christi Polymers, was approximately 90% complete as of October 2025. Under the proposed arrangement, Aquatech would finish construction, expand the facility, and connect it to the city's distribution network — with operations beginning within one year of a contract being signed and an initial output of 9 million gallons per day. That figure, while meaningful in an emergency context, represents a fraction of the city's needs; the Nueces River Authority is separately developing a Harbor Island project capable of supplying 50 million gallons per day, with a target operational date of 2029. The more consequential near-term decision may be the one set for April 9, when an emergency council session called by Mayor Paulette M. Guajardo will revisit the Inner Harbor desalination plant — the same project the council voted to abandon last year after cost estimates ballooned from approximately $757 million to $1,300,000,000. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has said the city 'squandered' the $757 million in low-interest loans from the Texas Water Development Board that remain attached to the Inner Harbor project. (Whether those funds can be redirected, preserved, or clawed back is one of the undisclosed variables heading into April 9.)
On the same news cycle, Canadian utility EPCOR Utilities Inc. held a public town hall in Galveston County on March 26 — the first community meeting since its permit application was filed with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in October 2025 — for its proposed Bayshore Desalination Facility in Texas City. The plant is designed to produce between 24.5 million and 26.5 million gallons of drinking water per day for a region home to nearly 8 million residents in the Houston metro and surrounding counties. EPCOR commissioned two independent environmental studies through Texas A&M University-Galveston; the first concluded that brine discharge from the facility would have 'little to no effect' on bay waters beyond half a mile from the discharge point, owing to rapid salinity mixing. The long-range rationale is stark: regional hydrological models project a water deficit of nearly 789,995 acre-feet per year by 2080 across Galveston, Harris, and 13 adjacent counties if current supply sources remain stressed.
Council member Kaylyn Paxson, who supported the Aquatech vote, said: 'I don't see any reason not to move forward with at least negotiating. And of course, I wish the best speed and luck to the project, because that's what we're looking for — that's what everyone is looking to this for, finding water.' City Manager Peter Zanoni has described desalination as 'a drought-resistant, long-term solution to providing water to the 500,000 people across seven counties who depend on the water system,' and has said the city should maintain enough supply for 'two, maybe even three times the demand at any point in time, regardless of if we're in drought or not.' Not everyone shares the optimism: James Dodson, former director of the Corpus Christi Water Department, said on March 6, 2026, that the situation is 'going to be an economic disaster.' For the EPCOR project, Matt Atwood, senior communications advisor for EPCOR, said: 'Houston, being one of the largest cities in the U.S., faces a notable water supply challenge right at its doorstep. Recognizing the abundant availability of seawater and the site's closeness to the market made it an obvious choice for us to move forward.'
For builders, the Corpus Christi episode is a case study in what happens when emergency procurement replaces long-range planning — and the price paid in optionality. Aquatech and Corpus Christi Polymers benefit from being the only permitted, near-complete private option in a city that suddenly has no better ones. For sustainability investors tracking water infrastructure, the simultaneous emergence of the EPCOR permit process and the Corpus Christi emergency vote suggests that Gulf Coast desalination has crossed from speculative to operational — though the technology, financing, and regulatory conditions that enable one project differ substantially from those governing the next. The quieter lesson in all of this is that the cost barriers long cited as desalination's ceiling did not fall because the technology made a sudden leap; they fell because the alternative — running out of water — became more expensive than the plant.