CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — The Corpus Christi City Council made it official at Tuesday’s regularly scheduled meeting – a desal plant is on the way.
Following lengthy public comment on the topic, the city council approved a second reading of five agenda items relating to the construction and funding for the Inner Harbor Seawater Desalination Plant.
When completed, this will be the first seawater desalination treatment plant for municipal use in the entire state, meaning it can provide water for every need.
Saying it is not enough to rely on rainfall and conservation efforts, the mayor and city council have long presented desal as an affordable, uninterruptible and drought-proof source of water for our region.
In 2022, the City of Corpus Christi received a water rights permit from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, followed by a draft discharge permit in 2023.
That cleared the way for Tuesday’s vote.
Drew Molly, the Chief Operating Officer of Corpus Christi Water will be leading the project. He told 3NEWS that in addition to creating construction-related jobs there will also be a long-term economic impact tied to the new plant.
"Our plan is to have our local city folks run, operate and maintain this plant," Molly said. "We don't want to outsource this to some company that is outside of the City of Corpus Christi, where they may not have as vested an interest in the local community."
The Inner Harbor Desal Treatment Plant is expected to produce 30 million gallons of water a day and be the second-largest municipal seawater desalination plant in the country.
When asked whether we have the expertise to operate a desal plant with this kind of capacity, Molly said that planners have already taken that into account.
"Is there going to be a little bit of a learning curve? Absolutely," Molly said. "So, when we design and build this project, we are going to have a phase called 'commissioning' where we are going to have a third party operate this plant for a period of time and side-by-side with our local staff, so that ultimately, our local staff will be trained up and they can run this plant well."
As we have previously reported, plans call for building a pilot plant this year to test the equipment that will be used on a smaller scale, before any water is integrated into our existing water system.
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