Posted by Corpus Christi is in a water crisis now but a glance up Interstate 37 reveals positive pathways forward
Corpus Christi is entering a water crisis that San Antonio solved for itself beginning well over a decade ago. The fundamental difference is not geography—it is strategy.
For large Texas cities’ water supply policies, a single phrase jumps to mind: “I’m from the future, I’m from San Antonio.” San Antonio is the only large Texas city to have built a water supply portfolio that integrates 6 distinct sources at major scale: local groundwater, imported groundwater, some surface water, desalinated brackish water, aquifer storage and recovery, and recycled municipal wastewater.
The San Antonio Water System (SAWS) also heavily emphasizes water conservation efforts. It does all these things to cost-effectively and securely slake the thirst of a large customer base that must also cope with climate volatility and growing demand from commercial users.
Consider the numbers. SAWS faces major peaks in summer demand while also experiencing substantial system demand growth. Fifteen years ago, wintertime minimum water usage was about 150 million gallons per day (about 227 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of volume). That quantity is now about 30% larger. Meanwhile, the highest demand summer days can see 350 million gallons of usage (530 Olympic swimming pools).
For more oil-oriented readers, that is the equivalent of about 8.3 million barrels per day of water flow—about 1.3 times larger than Saudi Arabia’s daily average oil exports before the 2026 Iran War began.
Source: SAWS, Author’s Analysis
Lessons From the San Antonio Experience
San Antonio’s experience offers at least four broad lessons for Corpus Christi and other Texas cities trying to balance growth, water supplies, and managing cost burdens on ratepayers.
Lesson #1: Supply Diversity = Supply Security
San Antonio sources water from 13 projects tapping seven distinct sources: groundwater from the Edwards, Trinity, Carrizo, Wilcox (brackish), and Simsboro Aquifers, surface water from Canyon Lake, and recycled municipal wastewater. It also stores water in underground aquifers to be pumped at times of need. Present storage is likely on the order of 140,000 acre-feet, or about half of the city’s annual water needs.
Edwards Aquifer supplies are still very much the baseload water source for San Antonio but the growing volume of non-Edwards sources, many of which are much more drought resistant, enhances the city’s water resilience. Each acre-foot of non-Edwards supply layered into the city’s water source curve creates maneuvering room for assuring customer water availability even if drought forces Edwards production cutbacks.
Lesson #2: Think About Water on a 25-to-50-Year Timeframe
Water is a multi-generational resource. As one of Texas’s finest, President Lyndon B. Johnson, put it in an address to Congress 58 years ago: “We will not have served the water needs of Americans if we meet only the requirements of today’s population. A prudent nation must look ahead and plan for tomorrow.”[1] These words ring true today and the ongoing challenges in Corpus Christi highlight what happens when short-term thinking impedes decisions that must be taken in the present to ensure resilience and security for the future decades ahead.
Many cities in the drier parts of Texas—such as Amarillo, El Paso, Lubbock, and Midland—think of water in 50 and even 100-year timeframes. San Antonio’s 2025 Water Management Plan looks out to 2075, 50 years ahead, and SAWS is actively developing supply sources intended to meet that long-term benchmark.
Lesson #3: Accept That The Cheap Water Is Gone and Resilience is Worth Paying For
Like any consumer of a high-volume commodity, cities generally reach for the cheapest water first. For San Antonio, that is the Edwards Aquifer. For Corpus Christi, it is Lakes Choke Canyon, Corpus Christi, and Texana.
In the interim, local groundwater will likely serve as a key gap filler. Such projects can be built rapidly, at least from an engineering standpoint. During the 2011-2015 drought, Midland brought its T-Bar Ranch project online in less than a year.
The legal environment is more challenging in Corpus Christi, with city of Sinton, a local water supply company, and a local farmer contesting the drilling and transport permits sought by Corpus Christi Water for a 23,000-acre purchase of groundwater rights north of the city that could help fill the looming supply gap. Getting the Evangeline Aquifer supplementary groundwater supplies into the Mary Rhodes Pipeline feeding Corpus Christi within 2026 is going to require a heroic effort.
Resilient, drought-proof water sources are available. But they take time and cost big dollars to develop. San Antonio’s H2Oaks brackish groundwater desalination plant took 2.5 years to physically construct. The larger desalination facilities that Corpus Christi contemplates building to desalinate seawater from the Gulf of Mexico will probably take closer to 5 years to build. Translating intent into water at the tap is not a fast process.
Water recycling also takes time to build, even under crisis conditions.
Lesson #4: Embrace Public-Private Partnerships
Texas Proposition 4 and its commitment to fund $20 billion in water infrastructure investment over the next two decades is a fantastic start. But the total infrastructure needs could be 7 to perhaps 10 times as large. Public funding simply will not be sufficient to meet total Texas water infrastructure investment needs.
San Antonio has set the example of the Vista Ridge project as a pioneering effort to bring in large scale water supplies via partnership with private developers. City and SAWS leaders almost certainly have a wealth of experiences and knowledge to share with their peers in Corpus Christi.
Public private partnerships will be a critical tool for achieving the 5:1 or even 10:1 unlock of private capital. Public private partnerships also deserve close consideration and policy support because large industrial consumers are major contributors to water demand growth.[2] Corpus Christi’s per capita water use data reveal how demand growth has not come from residential users, but instead from other system participants—many of them large industrial enterprises.
Ensuring that large consumers pay their fair share and that residential ratepayers are not left bearing a twin burden of higher rates and strained supplies is becoming an important policy priority.
“Bring your own water” will be the central principle. Just as datacenters and other large industrial electricity users are increasingly asked to build behind the meter electricity generation, so too may large water users along the coast be asked to either (1) build proprietary desalination units or else (2) make significant investments in upgrading and expanding municipal water systems that they seek to utilize.
Part of this process is that cities and water utilities will need to engage in proactive dialogue with customers. Simply promising water volumes and then failing to incorporate large water users as proactive supply builders is not a viable model. A city needs to ask the local refinery, the petchem plant, the steel mill, etc. what they can do to help defray capital costs of assuring reliable water supplies.
“Ask not just what the water system can do for you but also what you can do for the water system?” will be an important cornerstone of future industrial development in water-stressed parts of Texas.
Corpus Christi’s problem is not that water is unavailable. It is that the institutions, incentives, and timelines required to secure it were not aligned early enough. San Antonio shows that alignment is possible—but only with hard work and binding decisions made a decade in advance.
Now is the time to stave off the near-term crunch while simultaneously adopting long-term water security strategies. If done right, the current episode can become history to be studied rather than a recurring emergency to be painfully re-lived.
Suggested Citation: Gabriel Collins, “The San Antonio Model: A Water Resilience Playbook for Corpus Christi,” The Sinews of Civilization, Substack, 26 March 2026. https://gabrielcollins.substack.com/p/the-san-antonio-model-a-water-resilience
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[1] United States, President (Lyndon B. Johnson), Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1968, Book I (Washington, DC: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Service, General Services Administration, 1969), 360, https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/PPP-1968-book1
[2] A petrochemical facility requiring 20,000 acre-feet/year of water creates a similar level of system demand as perhaps 60,000 homes.