09/12/2025

Texas Is Running Out of Water — And Corpus Christi Is the First Warning Sign

Houston Chronicle | Chris Tomlinson | September 12, 2025

Texas Is Running Out of Water — And Corpus Christi Is the First Warning Sign

Texas’s water crisis is hitting Corpus Christi first, and billionaires have plans to profit.

Texas is staring down a water crisis, and Corpus Christi is ground zero — where politicians cater to global corporations while billionaires look to cash in on scarcity.

Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to yank state funding this week after Corpus Christi’s City Council scrapped a wildly over-budget desalination plant meant to turn seawater into refinery fuel. City officials say taxpayers can’t afford it; industry insists it can’t survive without it. 

Across Texas, cities and businesses are scrambling for water. Demand is expected to grow 120% as the state’s population reaches 51 million by 2070, the Texas Water Development Board predicted. Nearly half of those Texans will live in Houston or Dallas.

This spring, the Texas Legislature set aside $1 billion a year for water, for the next 20 years, split evenly between new supply projects, like pipelines and desalination plants, and repairing aging infrastructure.

But a Texas 2036 study says the real price tag is $154 billion by 2070: $73.7 billion to fix crumbling water systems, $59 billion for new supplies, and $21.1 billion for wastewater repairs.

The Dallas City Council’s 2024 Long Range Water Supply Plan sees a shortage emerging around 2040 if they don’t find new sources. The Metroplex expects demand to rise by 360 million gallons a day by 2070, four times the region’s current capacity.

Austin’s Water Forward plan calls for meeting growing demand with conservation, storage, and development of alternative supplies, such as water reclaimed from treatment plants.

San Antonio, long plagued by shortages, aims to wean itself from the shrinking Edwards Aquifer. But its future hinges on cutting per-person use.

These plans are ambitious and fragile.

A record drought, weaker conservation, or a surge from thirsty industries like data centers could upend them all. Corpus Christi’s mistake was overpromising to big business.

Billionaires to the rescue?

Under current Texas law, landowners can pump as much water from the ground as they wish, with little or no regulation. Texas has a long history of landowners taking so much water that it dries up the springs and streams on their neighbors’ properties.

Hedge fund billionaire Kyle Bass doesn’t believe the conservation plans will work and sees an opportunity for his firm, Conservation Equity Management. It owns two East Texas ranches over the prolific Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer, which stretches in a narrow band from the state’s northeast corner to Laredo.

Bass has applied for permits to pump 10 billion gallons of groundwater a year. He told my colleague Megan Kimble he aims to sell to customers “anywhere south of Waco and north of Dallas-Fort Worth.”

Pumping too much water, though, could hurt Houston. Springs from the Carrizo-Wilcox feed into the Trinity and San Jacinto Rivers. If those springs dry up, the flow of river water could slow and lower the lakes that supply Houston with drinking water.

Houston-area water systems have shifted to surface water after decades of groundwater pumping sank land and damaged homes and businesses. Upstream competition could make that shift costly.

Bass is not the first billionaire to try to profit from Texas’s water problems. In the late 1990s, West Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens hatched a plan to drill wells into the Ogallala Aquifer on his Panhandle ranch and sell water to Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio.

Pickens’ company, Mesa Water, cobbled together 3.3 million acre-feet of water rights, or more than 1 trillion gallons. The move infuriated Pickens’ neighbors, just as Bass’s plans have angered East Texans.

Ultimately, Pickens couldn’t find enough customers willing to pay high enough prices to pay for all the wells, pipelines and pumping stations needed to cross the challenging terrain. In 2011, Mesa sold the water rights to a local water authority.

Bass has geography on his side, but not local leaders. State Rep. Cody Harris, R-Palestine, passed a bill in the Texas House to put the plan on hold pending a scientific study, but the Texas Senate killed the bill after Bass hired Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s top campaign consultant as a lobbyist.

Corpus Christi’s City Council now faces a grim choice: defy Abbott and risk losing state money, or saddle taxpayers with $1.2 billion in debt to serve petrochemical giants like Exxon Mobil and Saudi Basic Industries. 

That choice — industry or neighbors — will soon confront communities across Texas. And billionaires are waiting to profit.