Posted by Long-term water security starts with asking the right questions.
The more zeroes an investment price tag carries and the more years it will operate for, the more important it is to ask the right framing questions. For seawater desalination projects like the ones currently being contemplated in Corpus Christi, Texas, the dollars are denominated in billions, and the operational lifetimes are measured in decades.
Under such conditions, incisive questions can illuminate the most efficient and effective strategic action pathways. It is a high-stakes version of the ancient carpentry principle that exhorts builders to measure thrice and cut once. The questions may not always yield clear, comfortable, and happy answers but they will generally establish a far more solid decision-making foundation than the present collision of panic and political acrimony could.
Question #1: Who is the Anchor Customer?
“Anchor customer” = a party with the financial wherewithal to sign a long-term take-or-pay water offtake agreement that can then underpin project financing.
The Nueces River Basin has three prospective mass-scale markets for desalinated water: (1) Corpus Christi, (2) Gulf Coast heavy industrial plants, and (3) San Antonio. SAWS has already built a diversified, high-resilience water supply portfolio and likely would not want to obligate its ratepayers to pay for pumping desalinated seawater 150 miles inland. Options 1 and 2 are closely tied to one another, since industrial customers have driven much of the incremental water demand growth in the Corpus area since 2010.
Notably missing from this are the I-35 Corridor cities like Kyle that the Nueces River Authority has worked to make Harbor Island customers. They are far inland. For them, looking 50 miles east for Carrizo-Wilcox groundwater likely makes far more economic and project risk sense than Gulf water that must be desalinated and then pumped 700 feet uphill and 160 miles horizontally.
That leaves Corpus Christi (ideally including key industrial water users) as the logical anchor customer, which then sets the stage for Question #2.
Question #2: How Much Water Do They Need Now, in 10 Years, and in 20 Years?
The amount of water needed matters for two core reasons. First is the “dumb” reason: how big do I need to build the plant?
Second is the slightly more sophisticated matter of “how do we run the plant to maximize its capital and operational efficiency?” This question is highly pertinent because a municipality’s water demand is not constant throughout the year. It varies tremendously between the July/August peak and January nadir, especially in a place like Corpus Christi where the difference between summertime and winter high temperatures can easily exceed 40 degrees Fahrenheit and where rainfall (and hence plant watering demand) can swing tremendously month to month and year to year.
Reverse osmosis facilities can ramp up and down to a certain extent but function best as high-utilization baseload water supply assets. As such, desalination plants won’t make sense as the sole or near-sole source of water under such conditions unless they are coupled with tremendous storage capacity to buffer demand swings.
Building massive tankage significantly increases project capital costs and storing excess water in open-air reservoirs incurs significant losses from evaporation and percolation into the ground that then burden ratepayers through additional passed-on operating costs. If desalination is the only viable source of long-term bulk water supplies—like in many parts of the Middle East—utilities accept these costs. But along the Gulf Coast where other supply options exist, it is not an optimal approach.
To use an electric power analogy, desalination plants are to a water grid what nuclear plants are to a power grid: baseload assets that are operationally happiest as close to steady state as possible. Corpus Christi is already developing additional groundwater supply assets, could scale up wastewater recycling, and when the rains return, some surface water comes back into the supply mix.
As such, desalination competes for space in a broader water supply portfolio and will do so based on discretionary decisions balancing cost of supply and reliability (which hinges on political leadership assessments of future drought risk). My instinct is that the sizing of the Inner Harbor Desalination Plant, which could have provided roughly 1/3 of Corpus Christi Water’s average annual daily system distribution, reflected such a portfolio calculation.
That in turn means that the Harbor Island facility is probably oversized relative to the portfolio-weighted demands of the customer that needs water the most and is located the closest—Corpus Christi.
As things stand now, building Harbor Island to its initially proposed capacity of 100 MGD would mean it could supply all of Corpus Christi’s water needs on an average annualized basis, which in turn means on most days it would either need to be throttled back, be supported by massive storage, or else be linked by a long-distance and expensive pipeline to customers further away that do not have the same acute need for water that Corpus does.
Question #3: Who Should Own the Project?
Proximity to the customers and ratepayers is critical for financial, operational, and political accountability. It is not my place to obligate Corpus Christi’s water utility as the project owner, but history of large-scale desalination in El Paso and San Antonio demonstrates successful utility ownership of desalination assets. In particular, owning and operating the assets under the utility’s umbrella meshes well with the concept of desalination as part of a more diversified supply portfolio integrating groundwater, surface water, and recycled water under a single engineering, operational, planning, and financing entity.
It is not inconceivable that a special purpose vehicle could run a large desalination plant separately and then sell the water back to Corpus Christi but if that path were chosen, the entity would need to demonstrate deep alignment with Corpus Christi ratepayers.
Question #4: How Should the Project Be Structured?
The current approach is megaproject-centric. That concentrates the payoff and potential scale. But it also commensurately concentrates financial and project risks, with intense sticker shock reactions from voters. Political tensions often follow.
Modular desalination may be an option to address these concerns. By modular, I mean a common site, a common power substation with substantial headroom to accommodate future project expansions, a common seawater intake and outfall, and other shared facilitating infrastructure to the extent practicable. This would allow reverse osmosis trains to be added modularly over time rather than committing the City to an immediate multibillion-dollar obligation.
Modular development would sacrifice some economies of scale in exchange for lower commitment risk, greater political flexibility, and the ability to learn from early operating experience before adding subsequent capacity.
Question #5: Who Can Build the Project Best and What Price Does It Need to Deliver Water At?
“Best” means a composite score factoring in speed, quality of execution, and political and regulatory acceptability to the customers and the project’s capital sponsors. To start, its location in the United States likely rules out Chinese EPC contractors, and also likely, a significant amount of China-origin content—particularly as the content comes closer to sensitive core parts of a public water supply facility.
Having ruled out a major global builder and most of its manufacturing factory floor, attention next turns to firms that have built lots of desalination plants and have an established track record of on-time, on-budget, high-quality execution. Without naming specific firms, Spanish, Korean, Israeli, and Japanese entities potentially have much to offer. At a minimum, they would be excellent partners for American EPC firms like Bechtel, CBI, and KBR that already have longstanding operational experience on the Gulf Coast.
The current potential Corpus Christi desalination plants with publicly quoted construction cost estimates—Inner Harbor and Harbor Island—sit above $30 million per million gallons/day of capacity. This places them in the upper quartile of costs in a dataset of 264 desalination plants with capacities of at least 10 MGD built globally since 1990.[i]
Project costs in turn feed directly into the single question many ratepayers and their elected representatives care about above virtually all else: what does the water cost and how does it compare to alternatives?
The bottom line is that desalinated water is much more expensive per thousand gallons than Corpus Christi’s traditional surface water supplies (3 to 9 times as much). But that is assuming surface water is available. The most expensive water is the water you don’t have. On that basis, the more accurate way to think about desalinated water costs is two-pronged: first, how much does it cost relative to emergency groundwater supplies (20% to 40% more)?[ii] And second, what is the cost of blending drought-proof desalinated baseload water into the broader supply portfolio?
The weighted average cost of the non-desal sources shown in the chart below is $2.24 per thousand gallons. Adding 30 MGD of desalinated water from the Harbor Island project raises that to $3.44 per thousand gallons. The cost increase is meaningful but likely manageable, especially considering the alternative of a Zero Day that could force major water rationing. It illustrates the importance of portfolio-blended water sourcing to manage costs while enhancing system resilience.
Sources: City of Corpus Christi budgets, water-supply updates, project announcements, rate schedules, and Legistar materials; Texas Water Development Board Region N planning documents; Nueces River Authority project and financial records; and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI data. Source IDs S01–S16 and S19–S21 in the author’s model correspond to the detailed source list accompanying the analysis.
Conclusion
Corpus Christi should probably be the principal municipal anchor; desalination should be sized as one component of a diversified portfolio rather than as a complete replacement system; ownership and risk should remain closely aligned with local ratepayers; capacity should be phased around shared infrastructure; and construction should involve a consortium combining global desalination experience with established Gulf Coast execution capacity.
Corpus Christi finds itself in a tough spot. But asking the right framing questions can anchor discussions and offer flashlights that ultimately illuminate a path to improved water security. That is the spirit I write this piece in.
Suggested Citation: Gabriel Collins, “5 Strategic Framing Questions for Desalination Projects in Corpus Christi, Texas,” The Sinews of Civilization, Substack, 16 July 2026. https://gabrielcollins.substack.com/p/corpus-christi-desalination-strategic-questions
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[i] The dataset was compiled with assistance from Anthropic’s Claude based on a template I designed. The dataset aims to capture total final project cost, including multiple phases. Expansions are noted separately so long as data can be found to support doing so. For combined power and desalination facilities, the dataset emphasizes the cost of the desalination facilities to maintain analytical consistency. Costs are converted from local currencies and normalized to March 2026 dollars to adjust for inflation. For plants large than 160 MGD, N =16. For 100-160 MGD facilities, N=38. For 60-100 MGD facilities, N=37. For 40-60 MGD facilities, N=31. For 25-40 MGD facilities, N=58. For 15-25 MGD facilities, N=40. For facilities of 15 MGD or less, N=44. Reported project scope may vary, particularly in the treatment of intake and outfall infrastructure, power connections, conveyance facilities, financing costs, and owner’s costs.
[ii] Depending on distance, imported groundwater can cost nearly as much as desalinated water because of the associated infrastructure capital costs.