Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Texas Tribune Tribcast for Tuesday,
March seventeenth. I'm Eleanor Klibanoff, joined as always by Matthew Watkins.
Thanks for being here, Matthew, happy to be here. We
should acknowledge that we're taping this on Friday. I feel
like news is happening so fast that we should acknowledge
we are taping this on the friday before because we
are trip cast going on vacation.
Speaker 2: That's right, spring break Break trib Cast.
Speaker 3: And actually I have a quick story for you, Eleanor,
which is I was doing this week the most obnoxious
of Austin things, which is going to a south By
Southwest party. And I met someone at the party, Robin,
who told me she was a loyal trip cast listener.
And the first thing she said to me was, you
need to learn Eleanor's title.
Speaker 2: The people are speaking, Matthew.
Speaker 1: The south By Southwest is just torn apart by your
inability to learn my titles.
Speaker 2: Yes, so so funny. Thank you for working on it.
And Robin, yes, well, we appreciate that.
Speaker 1: From Robin. The listeners have spoken. We are very excited
for today's episode. We are talking about you know bombshell
story that dropped by the time you're hearing this last
week from Inside Climate News or partners of the Texas Tribune,
where they reported that Corpus Christie is headed for a
water emergency within months. We'll reach a point next year
where city supply can no longer meet demand.
Speaker 2: That's according to the city's own website.
Speaker 1: You know Corpus as many Texans know, not just any
Texas city, I mean, home to one of the nation's
largest petroleum ports, provides a lot of jet fuel to
the entire country. Hugely impactful on like a number of fronts,
oil gas, all those things we love that we require
to keep our world churning. So obviously, a water emergency
in Corpus Christi potentially a water emergency for the whole state.
So to discuss what's going on there, and you know
the latest on all of that news, we are joined
by the reporter on that article, Dylan bad Or.
Speaker 2: I really should checked that before we started.
Speaker 4: Dylan Bador.
Speaker 1: That's pretty close, Dylan Badour, Which is crazy because I've
known you for many years. Dylan Badour here, if you
come on next time, I will get your last name.
Dylan Badoor, a reporter with Inside Climate News, and Incarnacion Serna,
a retired chemical plant operations manager based in Corpus.
Speaker 2: Thank you both for joining us.
Speaker 1: Thanks uh, Dylan, Maybe you can start tell us, just
to start us off, what is the current outlook for
water in Corpus and then we'll get into sort of
the details around how we got there.
Speaker 4: So the current outlook, which is actually based on my
reporting yesterday and today more recent than this story, is
that within the next month there's going to be mandatory,
unprecedented cuts in water use, and it, assuming the demand
curve that's currently projected, by next year, total depletion of
water supplies, nothing left in Corpus Christie's water resource. We're
looking at the Highland or the Nuiss River basins going
dry by the end of this year and Lake Texana,
the eastern water supply dry by early next year unless
we ramp down demand ahead of that, unless we cut
off water users. But at this point it's barreling headlong
into unprecedented catastrophe and that.
Speaker 2: Is bad, I would presume, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not a chemical engineer, but explained to us,
like why that's so alarming?
Speaker 4: This is extremely bad, and perhaps some of y'all have
seen by now the Governor Abbott's reaction on social media,
where I think many of us saw him a bit
more heated and unscripted on camera than we've ever seen before.
He appeared to be quite angry because this undermines his
entire you know, platform, and base and concept of Texas
as the industrial powerhouse growing under him, Because now what
we're looking at is the state having to shut down refineries,
having to tell companies like Exxon, Valero and Sitgo that
you need to shut that down and lay off your
employees because we were unable to provide you with the
water that your cooling towers need for your refineries not
to explode. So that's the position we're in here, and
everyone at this point is pointing fingers wondering who is
going to be the authority that brings down that that
verdict and starts telling people to shut off the tabs.
Speaker 1: I mean, when we're talking about and we can talk
about sort of what those cuts will look like, but
is it primarily going to be the major companies, the
big employers that are getting those curtailman orders, or is
that going to be you know, individual water consumers.
Speaker 4: There's no plan yet, nor is there any clarity on
who would be in an authoritative position to make those
decisions that you just said. You know, the governor has
threatened to take over Corpus Christi, which would be in
a position where he just steps in and appoints someone
to make those decisions. But you know, very interestingly, I
spoke with Robert mace Very, a prominent guy in Texas
water here. We just talked yesterday. He told me that
when he was with the Water Development Board after the
big drought twenty eleven to twenty fifteen, he went around
pushing to write a white paper on how Texas cities
would enact curtailment policies in this exact position, and nobody
would pick it up, and nobody would even talk about
it because it was too politically touchy, so it never
got done. So his corpus in fronts of this situation,
it's the office of City Manager Peter Zanoni that's going
to be coming up with. You know, these policies, unprecedented policies.
Speaker 3: They are going to have to be enacted, and basically,
whoever gets pointed to to cut off their water is
going to be very unhappy. You're basically talking about a
city with a population of more than three hundred thousand people.
I would imagine there's probably some outlying areas that would
be a fact by this too. You're talking about homes,
or you're talking about businesses that you know, effect beyond
just Corpus Christie. But as you wrote in your story,
the whole state, maybe the whole nation, the whole world.
Speaker 4: Really yes, indeed, I mean like Flint Hills refineries there,
this is a coke industries company supplies jet fuel via
pipeline directly to DFW Airport, to San Antonio and to Austin.
And it's in a way where the jet fuel that's
produced one day is loaded into airplanes you know, the
next day via pipeline. So it's a continuous supply and
when it's disrupted, you know, it's it's disrupted. So yeah,
it's a it's a pretty big situation that we're looking
at here in Canacion.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you, because you you know, have
worked in a lot of these large chemical facilities you
you know, live in in the Corpus area, what is
it about Corpus Christi that you know makes their water demand,
their water sort of needs so unique in Texas.
Speaker 5: Hearing Corpus Christie is seventy to eighty percent of the
total volume that the City of Corpus Christi and others
move around about one hundred million gallons a day. Seventy
five eighty go to industry. That right there tells you
a thousand things that you can deduce from. I just
got off the phone with Councilwoman Sylvia Campos from the
City of Corpus Christie, and she understood, you cannot squeeze
people anymore. I mean we brought it down. I look
at it from an individual use. City of Corpus Christie
supplies water for seven counties, a little over half a
million people people use. Now we're using thirty five gallons
a day. We probably were using forty forty five before,
maybe forty five. We've we've caught, we caught. We got
broken slabs, we got dead yards, trees. I am a
chemical engineer. Here's a fact. You can take it home.
This is a hard number or cooling towers and steam
generators use the majority of the water.
Speaker 1: Let me ask you, mister Serna, Can I ask you
a question at that because you talked about I mean,
you know, as I a person reading this article, you
think you read the sentence that Dylan wrote about you know, oh, well,
they can't necessarily just throttle down these like you know,
major plants all of a sudden to suddenly throw down
their water needs.
Speaker 2: And you think, well, that's why not. And then the
next sentence.
Speaker 1: Is because they all might blow up if you just
suddenly cut off their water.
Speaker 5: You don't shut down one of these processes all of
a sudden. You don't. And when you start up likewise,
you have to do it in a structured, well analyzed
and with very good procedures, or you blow the place up.
And history says that usually refineries and petrochemical plants they
explode and they blow up during shutdown and during startups. Now,
to take that steak or those statements and to say
that there's no way they can shut down, No, no,
they can shut down. When a hurricane comes to the
Bay and the weathermen says we're thirty miles away, it's
a category three, they immediately pull out those procedures and
they know exactly what they need to do, and they
shut down, and most of the time they don't blow up.
The plants and then two or three days later, you know,
the hurricane goes by, and they usually get priority to
get started again. Also, when their processes are not producing
the quantities or the efficiencies, then they shut down and
they open up equipment, they fix things, and then they
come back. How can they shut down? This is an emergency.
We don't have the water they can shut down.
Speaker 3: Let's take a step back here, because I think you're
touching on the question that I wanted to ask first,
and that is basically, how does the city, this big,
this important get to this position? Dylan, like, walk us through,
Like how we got here?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, I mean, in short, everyone saw this coming
from miles away and kind of walked straight into it.
And it has to do with three things really. The
first one is an over sold water supply, and this
results from the shale revolution, the fracking boom in Texas
when this huge increase in production of oil and gas
led to a downstream build out of petrochemical plants, refineries
and other stuff, which has shown just explained all consume
a lot of water, so that was coming. Number two
thing here is the overconfidence in the ability to build
a decyl plant that ultimately never has even come close
to being designed really salination, a seawater desalination plant.
Speaker 2: You explain just very briefly what that is.
Speaker 4: So this is a plant that uses a tremendous amount
of energy and creates a tremendous amount of waste and
pull fresh water out of the ocean. In short, they
use them in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, those places. So
this factor number two is that while this big industrial
boom was coming in, leaders in Corpus Christi, many without
the technical prowess that Chon has here, just said we're
going to build a desalination plant. Don't worry, everybody, come
in and we're gonna and we're going to build a
seawater desalination plant within two years. So that was the
number two factor they didn't do that. Number three drought
conditions approaching the worst ever on record in that region.
Speaker 3: Dylan, you talked about the desalinate desalination plant in your story.
I know you've written about it before, Right, this was
a big idea, you know, Corpus Christy. Obviously on the
Gulf there's a lot of water right there. You obviously
have to get it to a condition where it can
be used for the purposes that you describe. I think
a lot of people see desalination as a big solution
going forward because you're not as vulnerable to drought and
things like that. But it seems to me that it
bumped up against issues of cost and technology and also
environmental concerns. Right, a lot of people concerned about sort
of the byproduct of that desalination talk a little bit
about how we that fell apart.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it bumped up against a lot of stuff. What
you're referencing is that the discharge of the brine, super
salty brine. It became clear that this would really wipe
out the bay ecosystem of Corpus Christie Bay. Nuasis Bay
is already you know, kind of wrecked. But these bays
depend on a moderate salinity which comes largely from the
inflow of freshwater rivers into those bays. So that is
the characteristic defining feature of this environment. And then when
you are putting a discharge of brine. If we have
a desil plant that's producing thirty million gallons per day
of fresh water, that means it's creating at least what
shown sixty million gallons per day of brine or more
than that. Yeah, so this is this is you know,
you're going to increase the slity and it would wipe
out you know, phishing, economy, tourism, many things. But so
that was you know, what this all goes back to
was just really shoddy planning. And what it really goes
back to, I'm finding is processes that were dominated by
public administrators and business people and marketing professionals when there
should have been engineers running the show. And what this
resulted in was just an overconfident claim that we're going
to build deesa plants without any recognition of what kind
of task that was at hand. And when things started
coming up like oh, you're going to destroy the Bay ecosystem,
or as Chun would tell them, oh you're going to
need a waste disposal operation that has two trucks every
hour for twenty four hours a day, they started to realize, oh,
this is you know, we got into more than we
could think here. The idea was like, they can build
them in Israel, they can build them in Saudi Arabia.
If they can do that, we can build them in Texas.
But as folks like Chung pointed out, those kind trees
have a very different regulatory regime, a very different way
of doing things, a very different way of supplying water
to people. It just wasn't apples to apples, and so
the whole idea that they thought they were just going
to build a deesail plant in two years turned out
to be like a total farce.
Speaker 5: What have Yeah, let me just say this, Matthew and Eleanor,
we are ten years after they started talking about desalination,
the governor part of Corpus Christi Authority San Patrician Municipal
Water District Corpus Christi talking and talking and talking about
desalination by reversals. Moses, Okay, we are ten years, ten
years later, twenty twenty six. They have spent millions and
millions of dollars in false marketing propaganda, and ten years
they don't have what it takes to build a desalination plant.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Let me ask about this though.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's obviously a lot to be learned from
sort of where this all went wrong in terms of
like the very active crisis that Corpus Christy is facing today.
You know, as you reported in your story, the city
has said that they are drilling emergency water wells. They
are pursuing a groundwater program. They are potentially, you know,
looking back at resuming work on the seawater desalination plant.
Dylan like, what do you see as the path forward
for Corpus at this point?
Speaker 4: The path forward for Corpus this point is they need
to be urgently talking about how to ramp down demand,
how to cut customers off of the system as quickly
as possible, as opposed to just and so this is
essentially slowing down the vehicle before a crash as opposed
to just continuing full speed into the crash. The government
continues to insist on these emergency well and pipeline programs,
which indeed they are doing, but by all accounts, much
too late, and the problems encountered by these projects are
too you know, humorous to really go into just to
say they are not going to keep you know, change
this crash. Course, what the city needs to be doing
now is making these unprecedented plans, for example, asking questions
like who has the authority to shut down the cooling towers,
how are we going to do this? And what are
we going to do if water runs out entirely? Like
you know, a projections call for next year I.
Speaker 3: Want to dig a little bit deeper into that. Right,
you talk about water running out entirely, which is obviously,
you know, the worst case scenario that you can imagine
in this situation. I've already mentioned Governor Abbott talking about
possibly stepping in, having to take over the city. I'm
interested in exploring whether there's anything in statute that would
actually allow for that. But just like, I mean, is
there any precedent for this, Like, do we have any
sense of what could actually be done in that worst
case scenario to you know, take care of the three
hundred thousand people that live there and the industry that
relies on water.
Speaker 4: No, no real precedent, I mean in the world. One
of the most best examples you have is Cape Town,
South Africa, which has come extremely close to running out
of water. But the huge difference in Cape Town is
what Chehn had explained to you, that Corpus Christie is
unique in its industrial water demand, and that industrial water
demand uses you know, more than half, maybe sixty or
seventy percent of all water consumption, and unlike your household,
you can't just dial that down. It stays. So it's
a question of who has the political will to cut
these things off, you know, because we can't do like
Cape Town and everyone just cut out all water but
what you drink? No, there's not a precedent or guidance
on how this would play out, and it is not
a lot of preparation. Okay, let me say this. I
went to Corpus Christi last week trying to report a
story on how they were preparing for this emergency that
everybody knew was and that their website said was coming.
I became shocked to discover that there were no preparations whatsoever,
and nobody would barely even acknowledge this potential with me,
which their own website clearly indicated. So then I realized
this is deeply in denial. A lot of people feel
perhaps dangerously culpable here, and nobody wants to be the
one to say.
Speaker 2: You know, what are you hearing from big industry on this?
I mean, like, what you know?
Speaker 1: I think there were some people in your story sort
of expressing surprise that they were not doing their own
you know, desalination projects, They were not doing their own
sort of water projects.
Speaker 2: What are they saying?
Speaker 4: Well, one thing I hear from big industry is that
they were all following the models of the city of
Corpus Christi, which is, you know, a mid sized city
government and not perhaps the foremost technical expertise and things
like that, and it seems a little bit invested in
maintaining an optimistic outlook. So this is so a lot
of the biggest industrial customers have become surprised by inside
Climate News reporting about how close the disaster is because
the city was kind of holding their cards close to
their chest, thinking they were gonna find a way out
of this.
Speaker 3: So you mentioned like more recent cuts that have happened
in the past week or solely is that in reaction
to your story or what drove that?
Speaker 4: Not in the past week, in the upcoming month, there's
more the first cuts. Ever, what drove that? I think
it was when all officials started looking into this and
and just I mean literally lots of people knew that,
but the city has not been forthcoming. You know, what
experts told me is that Cape Town, which I said,
when they had this situation, they put up a doomsday
clock to day zero to show how everyone how serious
this was. In contrast, Corpus has the city officials have
totally refused to acknowledge perhaps until this reporting came out.
The severity of the situation here.
Speaker 3: I'm curious now that you've brought up Cape Town, like,
how did Cape Town avoid the catastrophe?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 4: Well, as I said, big difference, they didn't have the
industrial water demand that they couldn't stop, so, but how
did they stop the catastrophe? For one, they made everybody's
water consumption public. Every customer, how much water they used
was public information, so you could see if your neighbors were,
you know, not behaving. After a while, they invested a
lot of money installing devices on individual water customers that
cut you off after you consumed your allocation for that day,
so your water stopped running, and the doomsday clock. You know,
they were very public that we are facing an existential crisis,
and ultimately they were saved by really big rain. Wichita
Falls came close to running out of water around twenty
fifteen or maybe twenty eleven during that drought, saved by
a really big rain about ninety days out. I think
that's the plan here.
Speaker 3: Also, you mentioned in your story kind of praying for
a hurricane, which is obviously an odd position.
Speaker 1: For the end, right, Yeah, which would cause other problems
potentially yeah. I mean when you look at other places
like that, has there been Are there meaningful solutions out
there for increasing supply?
Speaker 4: For increasing supply.
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, if we were China, we could
build a massive pipeline from the Mississippi River real Crik
to Corpus Christie like we do with oil and gas
pipelines from the Permium basin all the time. But in
our current schema, that is not really an option. Now
talking with folks in the last few days, people have
raised the potential that the governor could issue an emergency
order to just do away with all obstacles and do
what needs to be done. But even in that case,
there's things like eminent domain, which gets you into a
real touchy ground if you could, you know, supersede that well.
Speaker 1: I mean, it sounds like there's going to be a
lot more developing on this story and a lot more
to come. But certainly I think a warning sort of
to a lot of cities in Texas that are struggling
with water, maybe sort of slightly less extreme scale on
the demand from commercial customers, but still, you know, the
state has put a lot of money in during the
less legislative session into shoring up the water supply, but
like a lot more to be done obviously, for sure.
Speaker 4: And I think one thing that this kind of highlights
is that all of the legislative talk around water and
all the political posturing on water to this point has
been irrelevant. All this water bill stuff in the legislature
and everything we've talked about up till this point is
not really impactful to any water supply situation in the state.
All the solutions have been done basically by private companies
getting in there to build pipelines or cities doing groundwater
import projects things like that. I mean, you know, there's
sure there's been a Water Development Board funding to a
small degree, but yeah, this is without leadership right now.
Speaker 3: Well, and it takes time obviously for those projects to
get online and everything like that. But I mean, it
really seemed like Abbot's frustration was with the city here
right like that that you know, he he mentioned what
seven hundred and fifty million dollars that was being you know,
in state funds that had been gone to Corpus Christy
and and sort of asking the question of like where
did that money go and how did that hell?
Speaker 2: I mean, is there truth to that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so only about maybe fifty million dollars of that
money was spent. It's not like they spent all of
it on nothing. Seven hundred and fifty million, but yeah,
the idea of these low infra, low interest infrastructure loans
was that they were going to, you know, build a
water supply, and they did not do that. So I
think Abbot is a bit wondering, like what else did
you want me to do here?
Speaker 5: And let me say something. Okay, the seven hundred and
fifty million that he's talking about that does not even build,
that does not even build you a ten million gallon
right now? A ten million Again, if you had everything ready,
everything ready, construction, engineering drawings, per meeting, the whole thing,
you would need nine hundred and fifty six million dollars
to do a ten million gallon a day.
Speaker 3: What I mean You've been in Corpus Christy for you know,
multiple trips. I mean, what are the people in that
city know or think about this? Right now?
Speaker 4: Much too little? I would say, yeah, I mean my
grandparents lived in Corpus my whole life. I'm pretty familiar
with that. And when I started going around twenty twenty
two to report on this water supply situation. It has
remained generally out of the public eye. I would say
the news we published this last week has put it
really more in the forefront than it ever has been.
But people are you know, as I said, the city
government's not forthcoming. They're not putting a doomsday clock saying
this is when we run out of water. They're saying,
don't worry everyone, we got this handled. And people in Corpus,
I think, are wondering what the truth is here.
Speaker 5: With the exception of some people, there's been people looking
at it even before I have, and they knew and
they're good people, and they get ignored. We all get ignored,
we all get abused, and so that's why I take
the attitude I take. But generally speaking, Dylan is right.
The biggest majority of the population, you know, they well,
people have to work, people have to do things. Some
people still have faith in our broken government and broken
ballots and so but there's groups of people out there
that they knew well.
Speaker 2: I think we might have to leave it there.
Speaker 1: But thank you Dylan and Carnacion for joining us for
a great conversation. Be a lot more to unpack about
this going forward.
Speaker 2: Thank you all.
Speaker 1: For joining us for the trip cast. Our producers are
Rob and Chris. You can find us anywhere you get
your podcasts, and we will see you next week.