Corpus Christi supplies the water to Port Aransas. We have been cut back about nine months and irrigation systems are restricted. The only water on grass has been very little rain and in the majority of places it's brown. Shrubs have taken a beating also.

So, what's the outcome here for those of us who are not well versed on this topic? Another thread pointed out that there is a huge desal plant approved in Port A that Corpus can opt into at a discount which it seems like they almost have to now. I have no idea what that means for Rockport (selfishly).

Corpus O&G industry builds their own plants? Industry up and moves? Switching costs seem high for that?

txags92 said:

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This was a real head scratcher and one that I think was avoidable if there had been somebody at the meeting from the contractor to discuss the reason for the pricing changes. They went from initially wanting a 10 MGD plant to a 30 MGD plant and went from trenching for the lines to wanting them all placed via horizontal drilling, and they are surprised the price went up?

If the price was just flat too high, they could have asked for a smaller plant initially and left in the design the ability to scale it up later. It is really dumb to quit on a project that was already fully permitted and for which they had already received funding from the state in favor of a bunch of uncertain ideas that might become viable projects years from now, but that are neither permitted nor funded right now.

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Welcome to government

sunchaser said:

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Corpus Christi supplies the water to Port Aransas. We have been cut back about nine months and irrigation systems are restricted. The only water on grass has been very little rain and in the majority of places it's brown. Shrubs have taken a beating also.

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Yeah, I'm living that. I turned off my sprinklers months ago.

YouBet said:

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So, what's the outcome here for those of us who are not well versed on this topic? Another thread pointed out that there is a huge desal plant approved in Port A that Corpus can opt into at a discount which it seems like they almost have to now. I have no idea what that means for Rockport (selfishly).

Corpus O&G industry builds their own plants? Industry up and moves? Switching costs seem high for that?

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Reducing industrial water by 25% you can expect to see significantly reduced production, which results in layoffs for operations staff. Maintenance work goes down, so maintenance contract staff gets reduced significantly. Any future upgrades or shutdowns likely get pushed back if not eliminated completely.

Plants may start looking at their own water treatment systems if it gets bad enough. They don't want to own and operate a water treatment facility for the most part, and that will actually compound water issues more than it helps resolve them most of the time.

If Port A has a desal and has the capacity after it goes online, sure, you can pipe water into corpus from there. That will cost Corpus money though and any pipeline across the channel will be a couple of years out before it can reasonably be expected to be online, not to mention any work that would have to be done at an integration structure to get it into the Corpus potable water system. Not impossible by any stretch, just requires the usual gamut of studies, permits, etc. that have to be navigated through.

YouBet said:

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So, what's the outcome here for those of us who are not well versed on this topic? Another thread pointed out that there is a huge desal plant approved in Port A that Corpus can opt into at a discount which it seems like they almost have to now. I have no idea what that means for Rockport (selfishly).

Corpus O&G industry builds their own plants? Industry up and moves? Switching costs seem high for that?

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The Harbor Island plant has only been approved to move forward by Port of CC and the Nueces River Authority so far. They still have to get their USACE and TCEQ permits and have not yet applied for any of the TWDB funding they will likely be using to pay for it. They face some of the same environmental issues as the CC plant, but they at least are planning to discharge the brine several miles offshore. Their siting is a bit more problematic than the CC plant was due to the potential for hurricane impacts. I would say at a minimum, they are 4-5 years from producing water, assuming they don't get held up in court by environmental lawsuits.

So realistically what are the order of consequences of desal not happening in the area? Water bill goes up? Run out of water from Choke? Industry moves out?

lazuras_dc said:

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So realistically what are the order of consequences of desal not happening in the area? Water bill goes up? Run out of water from Choke? Industry moves out?

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First will be severe water restrictions.

schmellba99 said:

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lazuras_dc said:

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So realistically what are the order of consequences of desal not happening in the area? Water bill goes up? Run out of water from Choke? Industry moves out?

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First will be severe water restrictions.

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Prices are going to go up too for paying interest on bonds that are not going towards building a plant. Wouldn't be surprised to see some of the plant expansions/new construction that was planned for the next 5 years to be put on hold or move somewhere else. With the water restrictions Schmellba mentioned will probably come reduced plant production, maybe cutting shifts, reduced turnaround maintenance, and layoffs. This really was a short sighted decision by the CC Council. They could have addressed all of their concerns without cutting the plant entirely, but now that they have missed the deadlines on the financing, they are kind of screwed.

Just tagging you so you see this.


Biologically, increasing or decreasing salinity of the bay system(s) will change reproductive habitats of all marine organisms; from fish to oysters and clams, to seagrasses.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0141113625001333
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272771419308005
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014111362200232X

The Texas coast is pretty cool because we have highly varied salinity levels throughout each bay system, and an increasing gradient as you go from the upper to lower coast due to the lessening effect of fresh water inflows.

That creates different and unique ecosystems to each bay system. Lower Laguna Madre is cool but hypersaline comparatively to the upper coast (which is also cool - just less unique).

One of the reasons Ike was, ecologically, bad was because it brought a ****load of deep ocean water to land in the from of the storm surge, that's not truly unique, but the storm surge water was HYPER saline from the deeper parts of the gulf and it really did a number on vegetation east of Houston from the coast to near i-10.

So, back to your original statement/question, yes dumping the processed water (hyper saline) into the bay system would 100% have, what I as an environmental ecologist would term as, a negative effect on marine life in the entire bay system. Based on salinity levels, marine life, say 10 miles from the coast, would be much less effected than the bay.

This does NOT bring cost into the picture, and admittedly I don't know much about it, but I can tell you this (which you know) those O&G companies run HUNDREDS of miles of pipeline under the ocean because it makes them ****loads of money. If this desal plant is necessary for industrial processing, well industrial processing should be able to foot most of the bill for constructing it is such a manner that it isn't a net-negative on the localized environment. And you know I'm not a tree-hugger, I'd work on this project if given the chance. I've just spitting facts.

OnlyForNow said:

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Just tagging you so you see this.


Biologically, increasing or decreasing salinity of the bay system(s) will change reproductive habitats of all marine organisms; from fish to oysters and clams, to seagrasses.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0141113625001333
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272771419308005
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014111362200232X

The Texas coast is pretty cool because we have highly varied salinity levels throughout each bay system, and an increasing gradient as you go from the upper to lower coast due to the lessening effect of fresh water inflows.

That creates different and unique ecosystems to each bay system. Lower Laguna Madre is cool but hypersaline comparatively to the upper coast (which is also cool - just less unique).

One of the reasons Ike was, ecologically, bad was because it brought a ****load of deep ocean water to land in the from of the storm surge, that's not truly unique, but the storm surge water was HYPER saline from the deeper parts of the gulf and it really did a number on vegetation east of Houston from the coast to near i-10.

So, back to your original statement/question, yes dumping the processed water (hyper saline) into the bay system would 100% have, what I as an environmental ecologist would term as, a negative effect on marine life in the entire bay system. Based on salinity levels, marine life, say 10 miles from the coast, would be much less effected than the bay.

This does NOT bring cost into the picture, and admittedly I don't know much about it, but I can tell you this (which you know) those O&G companies run HUNDREDS of miles of pipeline under the ocean because it makes them ****loads of money. If this desal plant is necessary for industrial processing, well industrial processing should be able to foot most of the bill for constructing it is such a manner that it isn't a net-negative on the localized environment. And you know I'm not a tree-hugger, I'd work on this project if given the chance. I've just spitting facts.

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Except that the water that was planned to be discharged to Baffin Bay would have certainly had a lower salinity than the bay and likely would have been lower TDS than the creek it was going to be discharged to. It was not "hypersaline" discharge relative to Baffin Bay or Petronila Creek. The Corpus Christi plant dumping to the CC channel would have been more of an issue, but would be going into a bay with more freshwater inflows coming in to dilute it. I agree that offshore is better, but getting the brine there from locations not directly on the coast has it own set of environmental liabilities, and protecting plants right on the coast from hurricane inundation and destruction has its own set of problems.

Again, I admittedly am not speaking from an educated position on the nature of desal plants,... Hell maybe they are permitted for specifics on their return water chemistry.

The great and all knowing Google says that it'd be about the same.

But if you're taking high salinity water in, and processing it, I don't see how the return water wouldn't be at a higher concentration.


Baffin Bay


Desal plant return water



I am not advocating the plant be located immediately adjacent to the coast, I'm saying that running pipelines is a much cheaper (not free) alternative to get the water away from the "near coast"

OnlyForNow said:

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Again, I admittedly am not speaking from an educated position on the nature of desal plants, but I don't really see how the return water would have a lower salinity content that the source/return water.

I am not advocating the plant be located immediately adjacent to the coast, I'm saying that running pipelines is a much cheaper (not free) alternative to get the water away from the "near coast"

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Because the source of the water for the plant that was going to discharge to Baffin Bay is brackish groundwater with a TDS of 3,000 to 10,000 ppm, not seawater with a TDS of 35,000 ppm or Baffin Bay water with a TDS of up to 100,000 ppm. The discharge TDS would have likely been somewhere around 2x the influent, so somewhere between 6,000 and 20,000 TDS. The stretch of Petronila Creek where the discharge was going to go has a TDS of around 15,000 ppm.

And running pipelines may be "cheap" in your mind, but it adds the environmental concerns associated with crossing channels that will be dredged, crossing shallow bay floors in sensitive bay systems that will be dragged by shrimpers, and crossing barrier islands and estuaries that have their own environmental sensitivities if you decide to build somewhere off the immediate coast. It is trading one set of concerns for another, while adding significantly to the cost (probably $3-10 million per mile depending on the lines size and how deep you need to bury it based on figures available online).

OnlyForNow said:

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Just tagging you so you see this.


Biologically, increasing or decreasing salinity of the bay system(s) will change reproductive habitats of all marine organisms; from fish to oysters and clams, to seagrasses.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0141113625001333
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272771419308005
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014111362200232X

The Texas coast is pretty cool because we have highly varied salinity levels throughout each bay system, and an increasing gradient as you go from the upper to lower coast due to the lessening effect of fresh water inflows.

That creates different and unique ecosystems to each bay system. Lower Laguna Madre is cool but hypersaline comparatively to the upper coast (which is also cool - just less unique).

One of the reasons Ike was, ecologically, bad was because it brought a ****load of deep ocean water to land in the from of the storm surge, that's not truly unique, but the storm surge water was HYPER saline from the deeper parts of the gulf and it really did a number on vegetation east of Houston from the coast to near i-10.

So, back to your original statement/question, yes dumping the processed water (hyper saline) into the bay system would 100% have, what I as an environmental ecologist would term as, a negative effect on marine life in the entire bay system. Based on salinity levels, marine life, say 10 miles from the coast, would be much less effected than the bay.

This does NOT bring cost into the picture, and admittedly I don't know much about it, but I can tell you this (which you know) those O&G companies run HUNDREDS of miles of pipeline under the ocean because it makes them ****loads of money. If this desal plant is necessary for industrial processing, well industrial processing should be able to foot most of the bill for constructing it is such a manner that it isn't a net-negative on the localized environment. And you know I'm not a tree-hugger, I'd work on this project if given the chance. I've just spitting facts.

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Ike was actually beneficial for much of the bay system. It scoured out the bottom and allowed for growth of seagrass beds that had been destroyed and nonexistent for probably 20 years. At least until the COE dumped dredge spoils from the ICW all over them and killed the grass beds.

Then Harvey killed off a lot of oyster beds in Galveston & East Bay with all the sediment and freshwater runoff it dumped into the bay.

TarponChaser said:

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OnlyForNow said:

---

Just tagging you so you see this.


Biologically, increasing or decreasing salinity of the bay system(s) will change reproductive habitats of all marine organisms; from fish to oysters and clams, to seagrasses.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0141113625001333
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272771419308005
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014111362200232X

The Texas coast is pretty cool because we have highly varied salinity levels throughout each bay system, and an increasing gradient as you go from the upper to lower coast due to the lessening effect of fresh water inflows.

That creates different and unique ecosystems to each bay system. Lower Laguna Madre is cool but hypersaline comparatively to the upper coast (which is also cool - just less unique).

One of the reasons Ike was, ecologically, bad was because it brought a ****load of deep ocean water to land in the from of the storm surge, that's not truly unique, but the storm surge water was HYPER saline from the deeper parts of the gulf and it really did a number on vegetation east of Houston from the coast to near i-10.

So, back to your original statement/question, yes dumping the processed water (hyper saline) into the bay system would 100% have, what I as an environmental ecologist would term as, a negative effect on marine life in the entire bay system. Based on salinity levels, marine life, say 10 miles from the coast, would be much less effected than the bay.

This does NOT bring cost into the picture, and admittedly I don't know much about it, but I can tell you this (which you know) those O&G companies run HUNDREDS of miles of pipeline under the ocean because it makes them ****loads of money. If this desal plant is necessary for industrial processing, well industrial processing should be able to foot most of the bill for constructing it is such a manner that it isn't a net-negative on the localized environment. And you know I'm not a tree-hugger, I'd work on this project if given the chance. I've just spitting facts.

---

Ike was actually beneficial for much of the bay system. It scoured out the bottom and allowed for growth of seagrass beds that had been destroyed and nonexistent for probably 20 years. At least until the COE dumped dredge spoils from the ICW all over them and killed the grass beds.

Then Harvey killed off a lot of oyster beds in Galveston & East Bay with all the sediment and freshwater runoff it dumped into the bay.

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True. The vegetation Ike killed east of Houston was mostly freshwater or brackish water marshes that were indundated with huge quantities of salt water from the storm surge. It was beneficial for things like seagrass beds, except where it piled debris from all the beach houses on top of them.

txags92 said:

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OnlyForNow said:

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Again, I admittedly am not speaking from an educated position on the nature of desal plants, but I don't really see how the return water would have a lower salinity content that the source/return water.

I am not advocating the plant be located immediately adjacent to the coast, I'm saying that running pipelines is a much cheaper (not free) alternative to get the water away from the "near coast"

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Because the source of the water for the plant that was going to discharge to Baffin Bay is brackish groundwater with a TDS of 3,000 to 10,000 ppm, not seawater with a TDS of 35,000 ppm or Baffin Bay water with a TDS of up to 100,000 ppm. The discharge TDS would have likely been somewhere around 2x the influent, so somewhere between 6,000 and 20,000 TDS. The stretch of Petronila Creek where the discharge was going to go has a TDS of around 15,000 ppm.

And running pipelines may be "cheap" in your mind, but it adds the environmental concerns associated with crossing channels that will be dredged, crossing shallow bay floors in sensitive bay systems that will be dragged by shrimpers, and crossing barrier islands and estuaries that have their own environmental sensitivities if you decide to build somewhere off the immediate coast. It is trading one set of concerns for another, while adding significantly to the cost (probably $3-10 million per mile depending on the lines size and how deep you need to bury it based on figures available online).

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Addressing your points 1 at a time...


Can't argue with source water being less saline than bay water in that case.


The pipeline argument, can be done if the water is that valuable. Being constructed in similar fashion to O&G PLs most terrestrial drainage channels of any significant depth, won't be open cut, they'll be HDD/bored. These lines are not generally in danger of being hit during shrimping and oystering because of the depth they are constructed to. I mean, adding 50 million dollars to a project of this scale, should be an acceptable variance.

You're ABSOLUTELY right that there is a increased cost, but again, if it's worth it, it'll be done.

The physical effects of the Hurricane aren't really the topic of things in question, its the chemical nature of the high saline water that a lower saline system isn't used to. That's all I was using as refence.

Entirely different target, but yes I agree.

OnlyForNow said:

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Just tagging you so you see this.


Biologically, increasing or decreasing salinity of the bay system(s) will change reproductive habitats of all marine organisms; from fish to oysters and clams, to seagrasses.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0141113625001333
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272771419308005
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014111362200232X

The Texas coast is pretty cool because we have highly varied salinity levels throughout each bay system, and an increasing gradient as you go from the upper to lower coast due to the lessening effect of fresh water inflows.

That creates different and unique ecosystems to each bay system. Lower Laguna Madre is cool but hypersaline comparatively to the upper coast (which is also cool - just less unique).

One of the reasons Ike was, ecologically, bad was because it brought a ****load of deep ocean water to land in the from of the storm surge, that's not truly unique, but the storm surge water was HYPER saline from the deeper parts of the gulf and it really did a number on vegetation east of Houston from the coast to near i-10.

So, back to your original statement/question, yes dumping the processed water (hyper saline) into the bay system would 100% have, what I as an environmental ecologist would term as, a negative effect on marine life in the entire bay system. Based on salinity levels, marine life, say 10 miles from the coast, would be much less effected than the bay.

This does NOT bring cost into the picture, and admittedly I don't know much about it, but I can tell you this (which you know) those O&G companies run HUNDREDS of miles of pipeline under the ocean because it makes them ****loads of money. If this desal plant is necessary for industrial processing, well industrial processing should be able to foot most of the bill for constructing it is such a manner that it isn't a net-negative on the localized environment. And you know I'm not a tree-hugger, I'd work on this project if given the chance. I've just spitting facts.

---

Initial studies for the Corpus plant showed about a .6 ppt change in salinity levels with dual discharge locations with diffusers in the LaQuinta channel, which is already higher saline than the rest of the bay due to lack of inflow and outflow. Those changes in salinity extend to about 100m from the discharge points, at which there is no change in the surrounding water. Big differences in changes depending on discharge design, flows, currents, etc. - it isn't just a big pipe pumping water out at the end.

Ike, Harvey, etc. are all naturally occurring phenomenon - no real point in bringing them into this because hurricanes and the associated flooding from sea and land happen whether there is any human development or not.

Not saying there wouldn't be some kind of impact - as I stated before, every thing we do has some kind of impact. Hell, what they do up in San Antonio or Austin has impacts on the bays because of how much we have changed water flow and discharge from the river systems into the bays. Only that impacts would be minimal, assuming design, TCEQ, etc. all do the job they are paid to do correctly and that it's been proven over and over again that nature handles small changes pretty well most of the time.

I don't know what the discharge brine salinity would be - the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer is pretty low on the salinity scale - almost to the fresh water point, so even if you double the ~3ppt that is average to 6, you are looking at less than 10ppt brine with a 50% recovery rate at most. Corpus Christi bay system as a whole is 28.5ppt average salinity, LaQuinta Channel is around 35-40ppt salinity IIRC, Baffin is about 50ppt average salinity.

A desal plant wouldn't be strictly for industrial, although industrial would still be CC Water's biggest customer that they sell water to at a noticeably higher rate (assuming they follow the same pricing model that every other purveyor I've done work for does) than domestic water - so again, the industry would be paying for the majority of the plant over time. But contrary to popular belief, the plants don't have money to burn in most cases. They are like everybody else - they have bills to pay, budgets to adhere to and shareholders they are beholden to. So "just pipe it into the gulf" isn't always a viable option, especially when you account for the massive cost that would impart on the project that is already in the billions. Those oil companies run hundreds of miles of pipe once they hit a well and they know they can recover the exploration and distribution costs as quickly as possible, not quite the same animal here.

Doesn't really matter at this point though - Corpus ****canned the desal plant and has no plan for water, and the Baffin plant will deep well inject the brine and just charge customers more for water.

txags92 said:

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OnlyForNow said:

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Again, I admittedly am not speaking from an educated position on the nature of desal plants, but I don't really see how the return water would have a lower salinity content that the source/return water.

I am not advocating the plant be located immediately adjacent to the coast, I'm saying that running pipelines is a much cheaper (not free) alternative to get the water away from the "near coast"

---

Because the source of the water for the plant that was going to discharge to Baffin Bay is brackish groundwater with a TDS of 3,000 to 10,000 ppm, not seawater with a TDS of 35,000 ppm or Baffin Bay water with a TDS of up to 100,000 ppm. The discharge TDS would have likely been somewhere around 2x the influent, so somewhere between 6,000 and 20,000 TDS. The stretch of Petronila Creek where the discharge was going to go has a TDS of around 15,000 ppm.

And running pipelines may be "cheap" in your mind, but it adds the environmental concerns associated with crossing channels that will be dredged, crossing shallow bay floors in sensitive bay systems that will be dragged by shrimpers, and crossing barrier islands and estuaries that have their own environmental sensitivities if you decide to build somewhere off the immediate coast. It is trading one set of concerns for another, while adding significantly to the cost (probably $3-10 million per mile depending on the lines size and how deep you need to bury it based on figures available online).

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20 years ago a baseline back of the napkin budget price for pipeline (water, wastewater, raw water, sewer) was $1MM/mile for a 24" line buried 48" TOP below grade on flat, dry land with zero obstructions whatsoever.

That was 20 years ago. Today it would be around $2MM/mile when you account for inflation and significant increase in raw cost of goods. Running ANY type of pipeline in coastal regions is about 3x-5x the baseline price, which is significantly higher today than 20 years ago. Micro-tunneling is even more expensive than that.

It's roughly 18 miles straight shot from where the plant was proposed (CC) to the edge of Mustang Island. That's just to the edge of the island. Rough guess for micro-tunneling a 48" discharge pipe just those 18 miles would be in the ~$200MM-$250MM range (assumes $15MM/mile to account for equipment, length of run, depth of run of 100 feet below bottom of bay, etc.) That just gets you to the Gulf, however far out you need to go after that would be additional cost. Throw another $75MM-$100MM on top of that, assuming you could place the pipe on top of the seabed and not have to trench or tunnel it in more.

Maintenance, repairs, etc. not included in that price - that would be a guess for construction only. I won't even add the cost of design onto that SWAG either.

Bottom line - stuff isn't cheap. Never has been, but it's even less cheap now than it was just 5-6 years ago before covid made everything stupid.