A Texas-Sized Water Crisis – Inside Climate News

Welcome to Inside Climate, a new podcast from the staff of Inside Climate News. 

In our second episode, co-host Jake Bolster interviews two of our Texas reporters, Dylan Baddour and Arcelia Martin, on a water crisis in Corpus Christi, Texas, that’s been decades in the making. 

Part of the problem has been Texas’ refusal to factor climate change into its water projections, which have consistently underestimated the severity of drought in the state. 

Part of the problem has been Corpus Christi’s penchant for economic development, promising too much of its water capacity to voracious industrial users in the petrochemical industry.

And part of the problem has been the city’s belief that desalinating seawater would solve all its freshwater problems—even though it has proven incapable of building a desalination plant. 

Now, a tiny water utility outside San Antonio has taken it upon itself to build a desalination plant for Corpus Christi and numerous surrounding municipalities, some to be connected by lengthy pipelines. The project dwarfs anything the Nueces River Authority has ever built, but now the NRA is partnering with Israeli desal giant IDE. This summer, heavy rains have given all involved some breathing room before the next drought cycle begins, as Dylan and Arcelia explain. 

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JAKE BOLSTER

They say everything is bigger in Texas, which may prove to be true as the state faces a water crisis in Corpus Christi unlike anything the city has ever experienced.

DYLAN BADDOUR: Corpus Christi has come as close to running out of water as practically any city in the United States.

JAKE BOLSTER

As officials scramble to keep taps running, are they putting too much hope into an untenable solution?

ARCELIA MARTIN: These municipalities and utilities signed contracts without knowing how expensive this water will be. 

JAKE BOLSTER

That’s coming up on Inside Climate.

Welcome to Inside Climate, I’m Jake Bolster.

Imagine running out of water.

For residents of Corpus Christi, Texas, that’s exactly what they have had to contemplate, recently, as a water crisis threatened to leave the city dry within months.

Officials have struggled to implement a long-term strategy to provide adequate access to water as major industrial users have moved-in to the area and sucked resources dry.

To understand what’s happening in South Texas, we’ll start with ICN reporter Dylan Baddour, who’s been following the story for months.

Welcome Dylan. Thanks for being here.

DYLAN BADDOUR

Yeah, thanks for having me, Jake. Glad to be here with you.

JAKE BOLSTER

Sure. So you’re our Texas-based reporters and you’ve been spending a lot of time on the water crisis and how it’s impacting Corpus Christi.

For people who are new to this and haven’t been following it, what’s actually happening right now in Corpus Christi? And why is this a story that people outside of Texas should care about?

DYLAN BADDOUR

Why should people care about it? Because Corpus Christi has come as close to running out of water as practically any city in the United States. They’ve rebounded a good bit since the beginning of this year, but they have about one year of water in storage right now, which would already be considered an emergency for any city. So what this story shows us or allows us to do is get to that point where we begin to see what it means for a city to run out of water. It’s something that’s been talked about in this country for a long time. It’s never really happened here, or on a large scale in the world in the modern times. So the possibilities that it raises are tremendously grave. And that’s what we’re dealing with here.

JAKE BOLSTER

You’re saying run out of water. I mean, do you mean that in a literal sense? What does that actually look like?

DYLAN BADDOUR

So, actually running out of water means there’s no water left. And that would mean everyone would have to leave the city, essentially. That there’s going to be emergency services trucking in bottled water, as people essentially have to leave. However, what we realized is it would never come to that point really because of the ways that water use would be restricted beforehand.

And that’s happened in some places. Like in Monterrey, in Mexico, a few years ago, they had kind of rolling blackouts in water, where service was only available at some parts of the day. Now, the difference between Corpus Christi is that more than half of its water is used by the industrial complex, the refineries and chemical plants. So while people can use less water and essentially conserve down to this very core minimum of what you drink and what you cook with, for these  industrial water users, there’s no real equivalent. They would just have to shut down, which is where you get that sort of domino effect in the city.

JAKE BOLSTER

And just to be clear, we’re not talking about a very small city here. I mean, there are close to half a million people in Corpus Christi, right?

DYLAN BADDOUR

Yes, in the metro area there are half a million people and they all get their water from the Corpus Christi water system, which is somewhat unique in the aspect that it supplies many more towns, cities, companies beyond Corpus Christi.

JAKE BOLSTER 

So half a million people, some of the biggest corporations on earth, and then running out of water. Something like this, I imagine, people didn’t wake up one day and go, we might run out of water tomorrow. This has probably been building for a while. Was there a central mistake that set the city on this path? 

DYLAN BADDOUR

Like you say, building for a long while and it had to do with a few mistakes. One of them was selling water to a big industrial expansion that came after the fracking boom, the shale revolution. The oil and gas business in Texas and the United States didn’t grow almost at all until that shale revolution came and then it exploded. We had all this new oil and especially gas. So all these big downstream developers were looking to put projects on the coast by the ports. So they came in, they got contracts, they bought a heck of a lot of water, even though everyone knew in Corpus Christi that their water supplies were tight. I mean, tight water supplies have been the reality of Corpus Christi for decades. So that was one mistake, and it ties into the second mistake, which is their plans to build a seawater desalination plant.

Because all along as they sold off this water and they said, we know supplies are tight, we’re going to allow this economic expansion. The reason was that they were going to build a seawater desalination plant to account for all that growth. And ultimately they were never able to do it. So they got to a situation where all these big companies are drawing so much water, they didn’t put in a replacement, and then we got into a historic drought. And the thing is that every drought in Corpus Christi since the 1990s is a historic drought. So you could have seen that one coming, but it’s what happened. It didn’t rain consistently for almost five years in some places. And that’s how they got to the point they got to at the beginning of this year where their main reservoir system was like seven percent full. And under a worst case scenario, they could have run out of water within months. And so that’s how we got here.

JAKE BOLSTER

Right. So Dylan, who are these large industrial users that have come to the region and started consuming a lot of water?

DYLAN BADDOUR

Well, a lot of them are some of the biggest companies you’ve heard of, OxyChem, Valero, Flint Hills, and the most notable perhaps, Exxon, which has built a humongous plastics plant in cooperation, in partnership with SABIC, which is the Saudi Arabian state chemical company. And this is the newest big complex of Corpus Christi’s industrial area. You know, they got all the old refineries there, but in 2022, this tremendous chemical complex, a so-called ethane cracker, which makes polyethylene plastic, came online and has become the region’s largest water consumer since then. So it uses the equivalent of all the residents of the city of Corpus Christi combined on most days. And that water is going to cooling towers, ultimately to make plastic.

JAKE BOLSTER 

Wow. So these companies are using as much as the municipality would otherwise use?

DYLAN BADDOUR

That was that one company.

JAKE BOLSTER

Oh wow.

DYLAN BADDOUR

Just the Exxon Sabic plastics plant. All of the big industrial users together, you know, actually it’s about the same, but they use half of the regional water, water demand. I was telling you just the residents of Corpus Christi, but now if we expand that to all five hundred thousand of the metro area, then yeah, they’re basically on par with the industrial users.

JAKE BOLSTER 

And is there anything these companies have proposed to limit their stress on the system?

DYLAN BADDOUR

Well, there’s lots of things that have been proposed. That’s part of what makes the whole thing so confusing. Valero, for example, is building some many millions of dollars pipeline from Corpus Christi’s wastewater treatment plant so that they can start using treated wastewater in their operations. So that would take their demand off of the system.

JAKE BOLSTER 

Yeah.

DYLAN BADDOUR

Actually, all of these big companies have been behind the push to build a desalination plant. And this is going all the way back to 2014. And not in a subtle or implicit way. I mean, there was a steering committee of industrial users that included OxyChem, Valero, Flint Hills, that was there formally advising this effort to build a seawater desalination plant because they knew that industrial demand was going to outstrip its allocated supply. So there are many ways they could build their own desalination plant. They haven’t done that yet. but there are many options on the table. It’s just a question of which one will be chosen and and pursued with kind of sufficient vigor and financing.

JAKE BOLSTER

One of the things I’ve loved about the way you’ve covered the crisis is that you’ve gone about it by talking to city managers, retired engineers, farmers who are having their wells go dry. Is there anyone whose story has really stuck with you in the reporting you’ve done on this topic?

DYLAN BADDOUR

Well, sure, lots of people whose stories have stuck with me. I’d say first and foremost is this the retired chemical engineer named Encarnacion Serna. He has worked on reverse osmosis water systems, which is the essence of a desalination system, at chemical plants there. He was a former operations manager for Air Liquide in nearby Victoria, working on water systems. So he knows what he’s talking about. He has a nice house on the bay because he’s a retired engineer. And in 2019, he heard they’re proposing a desalination plant up the water from him. So he got into this issue, began looking into it, into the permits. He has lots of technical expertise and very quickly saw that it made no sense what they were proposing, or that big assumptions were made without any real foresight. 

They said they were just gonna dispose of the sludge. So he says, Do you realize that this is like several dozen truckloads of sludge every day? Where are you going to put that? Many things like this. But in short, he called out many of the problems that these plans have faced exactly years ahead of time. And he was just not listened to, not well regarded at all by the city. And he turned out to be very, very right. So, it left him in a kind of angry and disenchanted state, which you know, I could feel a lot of that emotional energy from him as I spoke with him, and I felt like that informed the story a lot.

JAKE BOLSTER

And were you able to ever ascertain why the city ignored him or why his projections weren’t taken more seriously?

DYLAN BADDOUR

Well, the city of Corpus Christi has an interesting dynamic. Industry is very powerful there. You know, it’s a small city with a big industrial sector. So the city leadership, political leadership, basically just listens to what the industrial customers, big companies tell them because they assume, I think in most cases, these people know what they’re talking about, and for some reason they just operated on assurances that their desalination plans were a go as initially proposed. They initially said that their desalination plant would cost $160 million to produce 10 million gallons per day. and last year they said it was now $1.2 billion and they needed 30 million gallons per day.

Now the latest plant that’s being built by the Nueces River Authority is going to produce 100 million gallons per day and says it’s $6 billion. So all along there’s definitely this undercurrent that nobody really knew what they were talking about. And that has to do with the fact that American companies have not built seawater desalination plants. And basically nobody who was involved in the process except for some foreign companies had any expertise on this topic at all.

JAKE BOLSTER

So is this what your latest reporting gets into a little bit about the fact that, as state water planners have made projections, they have constantly revised Corpus Christi’s water supply down, I think twice in the past twenty five years, and they might do that again. So, what’s behind that? Why does that projection keep going down when forecasters revisit it?

DYLAN BADDOUR

Well they definitely will do that again because the state uses models to project its water needs into the future. So when planners say we should be good until the year 2050 or we need to add more supply, water supply in the year 2050, they’re using projections in these kind of state-design computer models. And those models use the worst drought that has ever happened as the worst case scenario. 

So basically they’re saying we’ll be good until 2050, so long as this is the worst drought that will happen in that time. However, in Corpus Christi, every drought since the ‘90s has been worse than the worst drought on record, and it’s been successively worse. So the ‘90s was worse than anything, the 2010s was worse than that, and this current drought of the 2020s is worse than any of those. So if each time the models were updated to incorporate this newer worse drought, and each time the timelines shrunk. 

When you talk about their estimates of the water supply, that’s a calculation which is called firm yield. Firm yield means how much water can we get out of these reservoirs during the worst drought on record, the worst case scenario. Bottom line, what can our reservoirs produce? But they were using past droughts and the current drought became worse. So when they rerun those calculations and say, how much can we get during the worst drought on record? As the worst drought on record gets worse, the numbers in their reservoirs get lower. And what this all traces back to in many ways is the just political refusal in Texas to incorporate climate projections, which, you know, related to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, because it’s been a long time that the scientific dialogue has raised this likelihood of worsening and intensifying droughts, which is exactly what happened in Corpus Christi. That was never reflected in plans. Plans continued to insist that nothing’s gonna get worse than what we’ve had. And when that happened repeatedly, you know, we were left farther and farther behind where the plans said we would be.

JAKE BOLSTER 

Why exactly are politicians and water managers in Texas not looking into future droughts or taking climate change into account when they make their projections?

DYLAN BADDOUR

Well, ostensibly because a lot of political leaders in Texas don’t believe, or didn’t in previous decades, that climate change was happening. But I think actually the real reason is because this is just not conducive to the business friendly policies here. You know, planning for worse drought means that we have to be cautious for something that we aren’t positive is going to happen, which would mean that Corpus Christi would not have been able to welcome in all that economic development and sell them that water. So Texas definitely has a policy of, you know, come in guys, build your projects and we’ll figure out the solutions as the problems arise, not one of being cautious about problems that we expect and planning accordingly.

JAKE BOLSTER

So is it, is it then as simple as if you take climate change into account, the city gets a more accurate estimate of the water it has available to it in the future?

DYLAN BADDOUR

Yes, it means they would have known, you know, back 20 years ago that they needed water supply much more quickly. Because if you look 10 years ago, the water plan, their planning document said, like I said, they had sufficient supplies until 2050. So that was during that fracking boom time. They looked at that water plan and they say, “Well, we got plenty of water, so bring in the industrial customers and we have time to solve it.”

However, that was using the drought of the 1990s in the calculations. The subsequent water plan used the drought of the 2010s and finds, actually our models show until 2030 when shortages start. So then Corpus Christie said, actually, yikes, we gotta go a bit faster. The next water plan issued this year came in a new drought, again worse than any of the prior ones, and it said, actually we’re in a shortage already because of this.

JAKE BOLSTER

You know, you and I, we both cover the water beat in these arid regions of the country, and I’ve heard a lot of talk about this super El Nino that could be forming right now. Are you hearing talk about that too? And, and if so, is that being brought up as a way to kind of maybe bail out Corpus Christi or how could, how could that affect the region?

DYLAN BADDOUR

Yeah, completely, we’re hearing tons of talk about that. That’s the greatest hope they have. The drought patterns in Texas appear quite correlated with El Nino. That these rainy years that El Nino brings are what punctuate and divide our droughts. So there is a lot of hope. And I am, you know, the rains did come this spring. They put water in the reservoirs, which kind of halted that catastrophic critical decline towards zero. And if those rains keep up, then Corpus Christi basically buys itself another cycle. As you know, this is what’s happened always. and each time we get closer and closer and closer to the bottom, and, you know, what this what the record shows there is that the next drought will very likely be worse.

JAKE BOLSTER 

Geez. So is that what you see happening in the next six months? 

DYLAN BADDOUR

Predictions are that we will get a rainy year. You know, the reservoirs of Corpus Christi, the largest one, Choke Canyon, it has not had major inflows in fifteen years, so we’re looking at a very large-scale thing that’s happening here. The last time it was full was in 2008, and it’s still at like seven percent. So we’re still in a, you know, very precarious situation. The next largest reservoir, Lake Corpus Christi, went about five years with no major inflows. And it has rebounded a bit since the rain, but it’s at about fifteen percent also, still in emergency levels. Now the third reservoir, the smallest, it has filled up entirely with rains this year. And it’s in a much rainier watershed, a hundred miles away.

In this situation, the city’s ratings by Fitch and Moody’s were downgraded. They lost a lot of investment. I mean, their city got a kind of horrible reputation. It was economically bad for the city in a very big way. They wasted all that money on that big groundwater project. So it’s not like a cutesy thing that they can just keep doing this, repeatedly through the decades, each time getting closer and closer to that sort of ledge of the abyss.

They’re gonna have to do something pretty quick, even if the reservoirs fill up with another super El Nino.

JAKE BOLSTER 

Well, hoping to be bailed out by Mother Nature is not a good position to find yourself in, for such a large city. Well, Dylan, thank you so much for all the reporting and walking us through what’s happened in Corpus Christi.

DYLAN BADDOUR

Yeah, great job, Jake. Thanks for having me.

JAKE BOLSTER 

Thanks. Next we’re going to speak with one of our colleagues, Arcelia Martin, who is also based in Texas. And between Arcelia and Dylan, Inside Climate News has recently published an investigation into this desalination proposal that Texas is trying very hard to get over the finish line, but after more than a decade has not materialized.

JAKE BOLSTER 

Hey Arcelia, how are you?

ARCELIA MARTIN 

Good Jake, how are you? 

JAKE BOLSTER 

So you are another of our Texas-based reporters and we just heard a little bit from Dylan about the desalination plant that you two have teamed up to cover. Can you start by just explaining what desalination is and why Texas has so keenly pursued this technology?

ARCELIA MARTIN 

That’s a really good place to start. Desalination is this intensive process of removing salt and other impurities from seawater. And so they use this technology called reverse osmosis, and the facility that Dylan and I have been investigating will be twice as large as the largest one currently in the country, which is in San Diego. So it’s looking to produce a hundred million gallons per day of this manufactured water.

So, how this facility would work is, there are going to be two gigantic tunnels. They’ll be 60 feet under the seafloor, and they’ll be miles away from Harbor Island, where the facility is, into the Gulf. And the tunnels will be used to intake seawater, and the other tunnel will be to get rid of the brine that’s produced. So, Texas officials are and have been looking for a drought-resistant way to overcome its water crisis, especially in Coastal Corpus Christi.  Desalination has kind of been this long-awaited prayer that hopefully would answer all of its concerns about its water shortages. So the belief is that if they’re able to get this desal plant up and running, it would kick off an era of financial prosperity and limitless economic expansion, all of which hasn’t been possible without abundant water supply.

JAKE BOLSTER

Right. And how much water are we talking about here?

ARCELIA MARTIN 

So we’re talking 100 million gallons a day. And you know, just to go back to what I mentioned about the San Diego one, that one’s 50 million gallons a day. So this is a really large project we’re talking about.

JAKE BOLSTER 

Right. It sounds like it. So Dylan was telling us a little bit about how the original plans for this plant collapsed and it was decades in the making, I think over $1 billion dollars. But now your story gets into what’s coming next. So briefly, you know, where are we at right now with this plant?

ARCELIA MARTIN 

So I mean Harbor Island was first outlined in 2017 by the port of Corpus Christi. But like other projects in the area, there’s been kind of political infighting and delays in administrative processes that have kind of put everyone in a bit of a stall. So where we are now is 2024, John Byrum, who’s the executive director of the Nueces River Authority, sent an unsolicited proposal to the port of Corpus Christi. And I mean, John Byrum believes that he can do something that no one else has been able to pull off. We don’t know what moved him to believe that he could do what so many others have been trying to do.

JAKE BOLSTER

Okay. And so the Nueces River Authority, I think they go by NRA, they came on in 2024 kind of trumpeting this plan. Who is the NRA in this case and I know you said earlier we’re not exactly sure what the motives are, but what does your reporting indicate might be possible?

ARCELIA MARTIN 

The NRA is a small state agency that is known for outreach and educational programs. So think lobbying for regional planning and river clean-ups. It’s not really known for taking on billion-dollar developments, and so that’s why when they sent a proposal to the port of Corpus Christi, there was a lot of raised eyebrows, like why? Why would they take that on?

JAKE BOLSTER

Do they have a track record of doing desal before?

ARCELIA MARTIN 

No. Which, to be fair, I mean no one in Texas so far has an up and running seawater desalination plant. They’ve been contributors to different water pipeline projects. But this is the first thing that they’re taking on on their own of this scale.

JAKE BOLSTER

What’s the liability in this scenario?

ARCELIA MARTIN

It’s the scrutiny of the project and how badly this region needs water, and it’s opening itself up to financial liability that it’s never managed. And that’s part of our story, the skepticism around the NRA’s ability and sophistication to pull off a project of this scale because their budget is at most, the highest year they’ve had is just over $4 million. And the project that we’re talking about, you and I, is $6 billion. And so kind of an underlying question throughout this whole thing is who’s gonna pay the bills?

JAKE BOLSTER 

So who is gonna pay the bills? How are they going about getting the money to construct this plant?

ARCELIA MARTIN 

So other people, when they’ve thought about financing a desalination plant, they’ve sought to get all of the money up front, as much financing as they possibly can, which inevitably has stalled a lot of these projects, which have been, for lack of a better word, dead in the water. Instead, Byrum has this different approach. He is trying to fund it one piece at a time. And so the initial piece of funding, which kind of spans from April 2024 to April 2025, is him and another executive of the NRA. They went up the coast towards San Antonio to small towns, cities, and different water supply corporations or utilities asking for reservation fees. So they have a hundred million gallons a day of capacity and they went around to different cities and utilities saying, “Hey, you can reserve your slice of this pie because once we’re out, we’re out.” And the idea was, is that these reservation fees would then be used to develop the plans for the inevitable pipeline system that will have to happen in order to get the water to the different customers. But at the same time, the NRA was doling out contracts to engineering firms, lobbying firms, and, and the question still kind of remains, how is it gonna foot all of the bills that it’s taking on?

JAKE BOLSTER

Okay. So, it sounds like they have approached, so far, smaller municipalities. Is that right? And they’ve sold some contracts. Have they sold all of the contracts for a hundred million gallons a day?

ARCELIA MARTIN 

Correct. Mm-hmm. There’s just around two million gallons a day left. So most of them, yes.

JAKE BOLSTER

Tell us what the red flags are and why it hasn’t come together yet.

ARCELIA MARTIN 

I mean first that the NRA executives were going around Central and South Texas talking to these municipalities and utilities, kind of pitching them this, you gotta hop on before it’s too late. You know, you gotta get this, the last bit of capacity that we have left. And they would tell them, once you pay this reservation fee, well then we’ll be all out of water. We’ll have sold the absolute last bit. But that happened multiple times.

And you know, another kind of red flag is that these municipalities and utilities signed contracts without knowing how expensive this water will be. The pipeline system has yet to be developed, and so therefore we don’t know the rates of it. And also by selecting IDE Technologies, which is a large Israeli desalination developer, IDE will sell water to the NRA, which then will sell to these municipalities and utilities. So Texans will, if this project goes through, Texans will be buying water essentially from this foreign company. And there’s no promise that that’s going to be with rates that I think Texans are accustomed to for water.

So the red flag of this project is just how costly this water will be if it’s developed. And then, you know, another red flag is the agency itself. It’s a small agency. There’s a lot of skepticism about its ability to pull a project off of this size. And one of the frontmen of the project, Travis Pruski, who is the chief operating officer, he resigned in May. 

He [said] in a letter to the board that he was really concerned about the numbers that Byrum was using, not only to its board members, but also to the city of Corpus Christi. He alleged in this letter that Byrum was inflating the number of reservations sold, as well as the corresponding cash in the bank, which to him was a big concern. Even though Pruski was with Byrum selling these reservation fees in the background, according to his letter, these were kind of doubts that were happening. And when an internal investigation that concluded in May found Byrum clear of wrongdoing, Pruski resigned at that board meeting. So that’s another element that’s kind of brought a lot of attention back to the NRA and kind of resowed some of that skepticism.

JAKE BOLSTER 

So it sounds like IDE, the Israeli desalination company, getting involved has brought an air of legitimacy or certainly advanced the prospects of the project more than beforehand. Can you talk about why that might be the case?

ARCELIA MARTIN 

Yeah, so I mean they’re considered one of the leaders of desalination technology. They have facilities up and running all over the world. They also have one in California, near San Diego. And you know, this has been a long courtship between Texas and the Israelis. IDE set up an office in Texas 10 years ago, and I believe in 2016, Gov. Greg Abbott went to Israel to tour one of their desalination facilities. And so, you know, that has really added an element of legitimacy to this project because there are now people on board who have experience developing facilities of this size. And I think before they came aboard, there wasn’t a lot of faith that this would get done, truthfully.

JAKE BOLSTER 

Something’s not adding up here. What in the course of your reporting have you come across that has surprised you the most?

ARCELIA MARTIN 

Yeah, the NRA has collected $6 million from these different municipalities and utilities for a $6 billion project. I think the part that was the most surprising was realizing how far away some of these cities that paid reservation fees were. And, you know, in getting those contracts, in reviewing the City of Kyle’s contract, in reviewing how large this pipeline system would have to be, the wheels started turning in our heads, ”My gosh, this is going to be really expensive once it finally gets to people’s faucets.” And that was something that before we had those contracts, we would have never been able to understand.

JAKE BOLSTER

And $6 billion, is that just for the plant itself or is that the plant plus all the pipelines necessary to get the water to these far flung municipalities?

ARCELIA MARTIN 

That’s the estimate for both the facility and the pipeline system. 

JAKE BOLSTER 

Yeah, not cheap.

ARCELIA MARTIN 

That’s what they’re worried about.

JAKE BOLSTER 

So, just zooming out now, can you tell us what reporting this story has taught you about Texas and its water crisis?

ARCELIA MARTIN 

Yeah, the story of the Nueces River Authority’s attempt to build the largest desalination plant in the country alone, I think, tells you a lot about how Texas has dealt with its water crisis. There were years of fumbling around, of you know, folks trying to get something on the books, other people seeking to stop it. And all the while water was running out and it wasn’t until there was this, like, critical point that now folks feel like, “Okay, we really gotta get serious. We gotta get this thing done and through.” And so John Byrum is coming in with this new plan, this new approach to get money, to get new water.

And some call Byrum’s approach a scheme. Some call it the last hope for a sustainable life in Texas’ coastal bend that doesn’t basically require prayers for downpours. But I think the defining factor of whether or not the story of Harbor Island will be added to the repertoire of inaction to deal with years-long drought and the overselling of Texas’ natural resources will be whether or not this desalination plant gets done. So perhaps we should say that this story is to be continued, maybe.

JAKE BOLSTER

Well I can’t wait to read more of your work and follow what you and Dylan come up with as you track this project. Arcelia, thanks so much for joining us.

ARCELIA MARTIN 

Hey, thanks for having us.

JAKE BOLSTER 

Our final thought today will be acknowledging a dear colleague in just a moment.

Inside Climate News isn’t possible without the hardworking journalists who have tirelessly pursued stories and investigations that have led to change and accountability. One of the best who exemplified that was Louisville-based ICN reporter James Bruggers, who died last month after battling thyroid cancer and pneumonia. He was 68 years old.

Bruggers spent more than 30 years dedicated to covering environmental justice, mainly for the Louisville Courier Journal, before spending the final seven years of his reporting career at Inside Climate News, where he focused on the Southeast region covering the impacts of coal mining, petrochemical plants and plastic pollution.

His award-winning reporting was recognized by numerous organizations, including the National Press Foundation and the Society of Environmental Journalists.

His passing has been hard on the newsroom because he was a fantastic collaborator, mentor and friend. Jim will be missed, but his impact on us and environmental journalism is everlasting.

Thanks for joining us – we’ll be back in two weeks with more reporting on Inside Climate.

KILEY PRICE

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