Parched Texas Gives Water Away to Oil, Gas and AI: Mark Gongloff

Imagine being marched by force through a desert with barely anything to drink while your captor repeatedly cools himself by dumping gallons of water on his head, and maybe you’ll start to get a sense of what it’s like to live in Texas these days.

Water supplies in South Texas, already stretched thin after a seven-year dry spell, are being further strained by thirsty oil refineries, petrochemical plants and other energy-related industries that have boomed in Corpus Christi in recent years, Bloomberg News reported recently. The obvious, bitter irony here is that the fossil-fuel industry that is consuming most of this water ...