Now, the Nueces River Authority’s funding for the desalination project is months from running out.

"Conceivably, we're out of money at the end of August in desal," board member Dan Suckley said at the agency’s June 25 meeting.

NRA CFO Robin Murray did not dispute him. "If we don't receive these additional payments — yes," she confirmed.

NRA Executive Director John Byrum has pointed to a possible financial lifeline: federal money he has told public audiences is coming from President Trump, though no commitment has ever been made and the record of what was actually requested remains unclear.

A decade ago, Corpus Christi’s regional water plan projected shortages as soon as 2050. The next plan, released five years later, shortened that timeline to 2030.

The next plan, released this year, said shortages were imminent, putting city leaders in a desperate scramble to avoid an emergency.  

Something’s not right with the calculations that underpin these plans, said John Michael, an engineering executive who has worked on local water infrastructure for 44 years.

“Whether it’s climate change or something else, our reservoir system is not as dependable as we once thought,” he said at his office in May.

He pointed to the regional water plans on his office table—700 pages in four-inch binders—which are prepared every five years by local committees using methodology provided by the State of Texas. These plans never factored in climate science or considered the projections that a warming planet could contribute to a drought as extreme as the one Corpus Christi now faces. 

In fact, as climate models predicted, every drought for the last 30 years in Corpus Christi, has exceeded the parameters contemplated in local plans, thanks to fatal delusions, deep in the heart of Texas’ methodology: Texas doesn’t plan for droughts to get worse. 

“The droughts keep getting worse,” said Michael, vice president of Hanson Professional Services in Corpus Christi.

The pitch is ambitious.

The Harbor Island Seawater Desalination Plant is a multi-billion dollar facility planned near Port Aransas, some 40 miles northwest of Corpus Christi. If built, the plant will convert seawater into fresh drinking water at the rate of some 100 million gallons per day.

At its Oct. 21, 2025, meeting, the Kyle City Council was offered a chance to buy in to the plant some 200 miles away at a cost of $500,000. Several council members agreed Kyle needed to “diversify its water portfolio” in light of worsening drought conditions and increased development in the city.

The council voted unanimously to invest in the plant in exchange for future water supplies.

At the time, Kyle residents worried that the vote was rushed. Now, Kyle Mayor Yvonne Flores-Cale is worried the city has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in something they’ll never see a return from.

“ Even before I was elected … I said, ‘I don't think this is a good idea,’” Flores-Cale said. “There's not enough solid information. ... To me, it almost seemed like a Ponzi scheme.”

IDE would own and operate the facility, selling water manufactured through high-tech and energy-intensive processes to the NRA through a public-private partnership.

“They need authority to sell water in Texas and we are that authority,” Byrum said in an interview. “We’re going to make sure there is some downward pricing pressure.”

Officials from the Nueces River Authority collected millions of dollars from cities and utility districts near San Antonio and Austin before they partnered with an Israeli desalination giant.

Something moved John Byrum. He believed he could succeed where others had not. 

The executive director of the Nueces River Authority (NRA)—a small, rural agency based 200 miles from the coast—decided to take up the banner, in 2024, of a desalination plant on Corpus Christi Bay. 

Plans to build seawater desalination plants had floundered for years near Corpus Christi, which provides water to a major complex of chemical plants and refineries, and the likelihood of water shortages was growing.

“Texas needed a sustainable supply of water in that area to protect the industry,” said Byrum, a veteran water manager with silver hair and a charming drawl. “This was the way to do it.”

The Port of Corpus Christi never secured financing for the multi-billion-dollar project, so Byrum would fund it one piece at a time. He took up collection, not from the region’s large industrial water users like ExxonMobil, OxyChemical and Valero, but from small towns and rural utilities in the hinterlands of San Antonio, 150 miles from the coast, that could theoretically be connected by pipeline to the desalination plant, according to records obtained by Inside Climate News. 

The agency collected $6.4 million from 18 cities, towns and utilities since March of last year, records show, while it doled out lobbying and engineering contracts for the Harbor Island desalination project near Corpus Christi. 

Executives collected money from as far away as the city of Kyle, south of Austin, where NRA’s chief operating officer at the time presented the City Council in October with plans to build the enormous pipeline from the coast by 2032, and an opportunity to reserve some of its water.

“We’re actually 90 percent sold out now,” Travis Pruski, the official, told the City Council. “You would buy the last 10 percent of the water.”

However, records show, Kyle bought the water, but Pruski didn’t stop selling. The agency continued to sell reservations for five months after Kyle paid its $500,000 deposit. In fact, the water was never sold out, records show.

Pruski resigned from the NRA in May, after alleging that Byrum misrepresented financial figures to Corpus Christi’s City Council and the agency’s board members. Byrum denies that and continues his work to build the desalination plant.

Pruski, a career fundraising professional and former mayor of the small town of Poth, declined to comment on the specifics of his time with the NRA or the allegations in his resignation letter.

“I’m not really wanting to talk about that right now,” he said. “I’ve kind of moved on with my life.” 

In May, Byrum’s NRA announced a partnership with Israeli desalination giant IDE Technologies, which described the Harbor Island plant as the largest seawater desalination project in the Western Hemisphere.

First outlined in 2017 by the Port of Corpus Christi, plans for Harbor Island stalled amid feuding with the city government and its competing desalination project. 

Later, the little NRA faced steep skepticism over its wherewithal to take on such an enormous endeavor. 

Now, the partnership with IDE, a global leader in seawater desalination, marks the strongest sign yet that the landmark project could become a reality. It also means future Texans might pay a foreign company for water.

IDE would own and operate the facility, selling water manufactured through high-tech and energy-intensive processes to the NRA through a public-private partnership.

“They need authority to sell water in Texas and we are that authority,” Byrum said in an interview. “We’re going to make sure there is some downward pricing pressure.”

Not from Corpus but Calhoun County by Victoria

YUNLIN COUNTY, Taiwan—In many ways, at nearly 80 years old, Diane Wilson would have rather stayed home. A retired shrimper with a high school education, she agreed to come here without thinking too much, as usual. That’s how she does things.

That’s why she’d spent all of March camped outside a chemical plant on a hunger strike near her tiny Gulf Coast town in Texas, and why now she was on a dock in Taiwan listening to a gray-haired oysterman speak in Mandarin.

Wilson liked the man, named Lin Chun Lan. She smiled as she discovered how much they had in common. As fisherfolk they shared a reverence for the bounty of the ocean and a stubborn refusal to abandon its pursuit. That’s what drove them both to fight the same multi-billion-dollar company, Formosa Plastics Corp. Both persisted for decades. Both earned the ire of local power structures.

“They know that no one can buy him,” a translator for the oysterman told Wilson and the half-dozen others gathered on the dock in what happened to be one of the hottest weeks in Taiwanese history. “The local politicians hate him.”

Lin added a few more words in Chinese.

“He also hates the politicians,” his translator said.

Wilson laughed. She could relate.

At home, almost 40 years of radical activism left her branded as an extremist, an environmentalist with few friends in a political system devoted to economic growth.

A Shrimper and an Oysterman

Looking over the remnants of his oyster farm, Lin recounted the difficulties of organizing for 30 years against industrial giants, including Formosa Plastics, which once planned to fill this patch of sea with earth and create new land to build a steel mill.

Very few civic leaders, academics and environmental groups ever supported him, he said. If townspeople spoke out, Formosa heaped gifts on their friends and family. If that didn’t work, criminal organizations stepped in to intimidate him.

“He was threatened with guns,” Lin’s translator said. “He said, ‘If you want to shoot me, just shoot.’”

Lin was never shot. But later construction of industrial shipping infrastructure offshore affected water currents here, Lin said, so the ocean began lapping mud into the clear lagoon where he used to farm. After so many generations, most of the fishermen along this coastline are gone.

Wilson could relate to that, too. Born in 1948, she remembers watching the timeless way of life in her Texas fishing village dwindle to practically nothing as marine life faded from the water while petrochemical industries moved in with higher-paying jobs. For refusing to bow to the new order, Wilson felt shunned at home.

She asked Lin if he ever went to gather wild oysters from natural reefs like they did in Texas. In his grandmother’s time they did that, he said.

He looked at Wilson, whose frizzy grey hair blew over her face in the wind, and asked if she remembered him. Wilson, 78, suspected that she did. But her memories were jumbled. This was her fourth time in Taiwan, she told him proudly.

This country played a big role in her life.

YUNLIN COUNTY, Taiwan—In many ways, at nearly 80 years old, Diane Wilson would have rather stayed home. A retired shrimper with a high school education, she agreed to come here without thinking too much, as usual. That’s how she does things.

That’s why she’d spent all of March camped outside a chemical plant on a hunger strike near her tiny Gulf Coast town in Texas, and why now she was on a dock in Taiwan listening to a gray-haired oysterman speak in Mandarin.

Wilson liked the man, named Lin Chun Lan. She smiled as she discovered how much they had in common. As fisherfolk they shared a reverence for the bounty of the ocean and a stubborn refusal to abandon its pursuit. That’s what drove them both to fight the same multi-billion-dollar company, Formosa Plastics Corp. Both persisted for decades. Both earned the ire of local power structures.

“They know that no one can buy him,” a translator for the oysterman told Wilson and the half-dozen others gathered on the dock in what happened to be one of the hottest weeks in Taiwanese history. “The local politicians hate him.”

Lin added a few more words in Chinese.

“He also hates the politicians,” his translator said.

Wilson laughed. She could relate.

At home, almost 40 years of radical activism left her branded as an extremist, an environmentalist with few friends in a political system devoted to economic growth. But outside the system she counts plenty of allies, especially since she received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2023 for her landmark lawsuit and $50 million settlement agreement with Formosa Plastics on the Gulf Coast of Texas.

Now she had crossed 13 time zones to confront Formosa’s leadership on its home turf, at its annual shareholder meeting in Taipei, and two of her strongest allies joined her: Sharon Lavigne, 76, a retired special education teacher from Louisiana’s St. James Parish, who also won the Goldman Prize for her fight against Formosa’s plans to build in her community; and Nancy Bui, 72, a former Vietnamese refugee in Texas whose organization is suing Formosa in Taiwanese court over a 2016 disaster in Vietnam.

Wilson didn’t expect to change the minds of Formosa’s board and chairman or to otherwise win concessions on this trip to Taiwan. That wasn’t the point.

The city of Sinton found itself with an emergency water reserve and decided the real emergency was a data center that doesn’t have enough water to run its servers. This is happening in a region where Corpus Christi is so dry Abbott has floated a state takeover.

Expectations of a powerful "super El Niño" event this year suggest that intensely wet weather could return to the Coastal Bend of Texas this fall. The record-breaking Texas drought of 2011-2014 ended with the onset of El Niño. Then 2015 became Texas’ wettest year on record. On Memorial Day weekend in 2015, catastrophic flooding tore through the Texas Hill Country and the town of Wimberley. 

Successive years saw disastrous flooding across Texas, including in Houston in 2015, 2016 and 2017.

“Every one of those years we had devastating flooding,” said Greg Waller, an operational hydrologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Fort Worth. However, he cautioned, “no two events are exactly alike,” and past weather patterns offer no guarantees for the future. 

And that period did not refill Corpus Christi’s reservoirs entirely. Choke Canyon hasn’t been full since 2008. Not even super El Niño is guaranteed to solve Corpus Christi’s water problem. 

“I think it will help,” said Pat Fitzpatrick, atmospheric sciences program coordinator at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. “I don’t know if we will get out of the drought that easily.”

Lake Texana, the smallest of Corpus Christi’s three reservoirs, rebounded from record lows last month when it received its first inflows in eight months. Worst-case projections in mid-April showed the lake going dry by summer. Now it should last until early next year, at least. 

It’s one small step in a regional water crisis that has developed over decades. But the short bridge that recent rains provided goes a long way to helping the region narrowly avoid a disaster, local water planners say. Expectations of a powerful “super El Niño” event this year suggest that intensely wet weather could return to the Coastal Bend of Texas this fall, potentially putting water into the region’s largest reservoirs, which have fallen to critical levels. 

Earlier this year, water planners in Corpus Christi worried their reservoirs could empty before El Niño appeared to save them. The recent boost to Lake Texana significantly lowers that likelihood, according to John Michael, an engineering firm executive who has spent 44 years working on water infrastructure in the region.  

“We’ve just got to get through this year,” said Michael, local vice president of Hanson Professional Services, an engineering firm with offices around the country. “I’m much more optimistic today than I was three months ago.”

If levels continue to rise in Lake Texana, 100 miles northeast of Corpus Christi and linked to the city by pipeline, it could meet the region’s domestic and industrial water needs well into next year. By that time, planners hope El Niño will end five consecutive years of record-breaking heat and drought.

Dry spells in Texas have been known to conclude with deluges, said Matt Lanza, a longtime Houston meteorologist and co-founder of the website Space City Weather.  

“We’ve had some false starts the last couple years,” he said. “We are hopefully beginning to see the end of the drought in South Texas, but only time can tell.”

Narrowly avoiding a water disaster doesn’t mean that Corpus Christi has solved its water crisis. The region’s largest source of water, the Choke Canyon Reservoir, has received three minor inflow events and zero major inflow in the last 15 years, according to Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon. The next-largest reservoir, Lake Corpus Christi, hasn’t logged inflows in five years. 

Both reservoirs combined are about 8 percent full, as the region’s industrial complexes continue to draw large volumes of water daily. A return of moderate rainfall could keep Corpus Christi from emptying its main reservoirs, but it wouldn’t likely fill them up anytime soon.

“We are in drought, but we also have the water shortage,” said Juan Peña, lead meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Corpus Christi. “Drought is … short-term. The water shortage is more long-term.”

It’s rare to find specific figures for the volumes of water these things plan to consume for evaporative cooling. In this case it looks like it came out because someone broke their NDA.

Corpus Christi needs the groundwater beneath the small town of Sinton so urgently that it’s already laying pipeline, even before it has the permits to start drilling for water.

Sinton, with 5,500 residents about half an hour north, is fighting those permits in court, citing concerns for its own water supply. But leaders in Corpus Christi, which supplies water to half a million people, now suggest an ulterior motive: Sinton wants a thirsty, new complex of data centers.

Officials and executives in Corpus Christi point to recent land deals, well permits and a rezoning ordinance as evidence for the data center plans. Officials in Sinton neither confirm nor deny Corpus Christi’s supposition.

“It is rumors,” said John Hobson, Sinton’s city manager, declining to say whether or not it is true.

Everyone involved in the deal probably signed non-disclosure agreements, said Greg Ellis, an attorney for the San Patricio Groundwater Conservation District, which is based in Sinton and issued the drilling permits in dispute.

“Seems like it’s gotten out anyway,” he said. “I find the rumor very believable.”

The mayor of Corpus Christi called an emergency meeting last month to deliver a dire warning: The city, among the largest in Texas, was running out of water. City leaders had to make a plan, and fast.

“Every day of delay increases uncertainty,” the mayor, Paulette Guajardo, told the City Council. Officials had warned that demand for water could outstrip supply within months.

Corpus Christi, a coastal city of more than 300,000 and home to a large industrial port, is not alone in grappling with water shortages. Half the nation is dealing with a persistent drought, according to federal data, at the same time as industrial water demand has risen because of growing needs from power plants and data centers.

But Corpus Christi’s struggle to respond could serve as a warning to cities around Texas and across the country, officials said.

“This is actually the canary in the coal mine,” said Charles Perry, a Republican who chairs a committee on water in the Texas Senate.

Faced with a looming water crisis, Gov. Greg Abbott has threatened a state takeover, saying he may be forced to “run that city.” President Trump, during a visit last month, promised the city federal support for water projects.

Corpus Christi’s water problem has been building for several years. Its port and industrial corridor have expanded with the encouragement of the state and local government. New water sources have not kept pace. Then came a major, ongoing drought, now in its fifth year.

Major industrial companies, which use half the city’s water each day, have recently taken some steps to reduce consumption, like using more internally recycled water and cutting back on fleet vehicle washes, industry representatives said. But city officials said the companies have not made drastic cuts.

Bob Paulison, executive director of the Coastal Bend Industry Association, which represents companies with local footprints like Citgo and Valero Energy, said simply shutting down industry is not a viable option.

“There are hundreds of billions of dollars of investment at stake,” he said in an interview, “and the future of an entire region.”

Failure to address the crisis would ripple far beyond Corpus Christi. The city supplies water to about half a million customers in seven counties and the industrial companies that produce products like jet fuel, plastics and steel.

But the City Council, which is tasked with fixing the problem, has been wracked by infighting and high turnover. There is an effort to remove the mayor from office, and even mundane policy discussions devolve into sniping. At the emergency meeting last month, some council members questioned the mayor’s focus on a desalination project that, they said, would not solve the city’s immediate water problems.

“It’s clearly dysfunctional,” Peter Zanoni, the city manager, said in an interview.

Without a quick solution, there has been an all-out scramble for water in recent months. Residents have been asked to conserve as the city drills new wells. Even the school district is looking at drilling. All of the projects could cost around $1 billion, which would increase the city’s debt by 50 percent. Officials have also discussed building multiple desalination plants similar to those used in the Middle East to turn seawater in drinkable water.