“I Was Having a Good Time”: How Did a Small Town in South Texas Get Hit With Two Oil Spills?
- Alex Ip
- May 27
- 13 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
A playing field tilted towards regional officials, Texas Republicans, and foreign energy companies did residents in.
This is the second story of a three-part series produced by The Xylom and co-published by Drilled, Floodlight, and Deceleration News. Read Part 1 and Part 3 here.
On December 25th, 2022, the 614 residents of Ingleside on the Bay, Texas, woke up to a yellow Christmas.
Though South Texas avoided the worst of the Arctic “bomb cyclone” sweeping through the U.S. that week, Corpus Christi Bay was still more than 30 degrees colder than usual. Three days before, temperatures plunged from a crisp 68 degrees Fahrenheit to a freezing 26; by Christmas Eve, the thermostat stuck stubbornly at 24.
Few homes in South Texas are insulated for wintry weather — they’ve never had to be. Corpus Christi Water advised those whose homes had lost power or weren’t well-insulated to keep a faucet dripping through the worst of the cold as a last resort to protect their plumbing systems.
Flint Hills workers completed a freeze protection checklist ahead of the upcoming extreme weather. But the checklist didn’t include inspecting the pipes on Dock 5, the pier that swapped hands in the NS Ingleside land sale. Unbeknownst to the freeze protection detail, another team of Flint Hills workers had dismantled a water drainage pump there in June, but failed to drain the pipe connecting the terminal and where the pump used to be. Three of the four valves that should have been closed when the pipe was not in use remained open.
In other words, Flint Hills had a stray pipe connected to three million gallons of crude oil exposed to an Arctic freeze. And there was no dripping faucet.
A hundred feet off the shoreline, the liquid inside expanded under the cold until the three-inch pipe gave way in multiple places. As crude oil gushed out, no sensors were near the broken pipe to detect the leak. `
Flint Hills found out about the leak later that night. They called in crews of the U.S. Coast Guard and the Texas General Land Office to help contain it. First responders rushed in with portable lights, orange protective booms, and neon yellow drum skimmers to work through the freezing darkness. But it was too late: an April 2023 official investigation estimated that over 14,000 gallons (335 barrels) of light crude oil were discharged. Even if this was a drop in the bucket from Flint Hills’ perspective, every day over the next few months, lumps of yellow paraffin wax would float across Corpus Christi Bay, waiting to be scooped up.
“I’ve only lived here for seven years[...] [T]here was nothing over there except a naval base that was decommissioned,” recalled retired machine operator and salesman Douglas Smith on Facebook. “Now they’ve pretty much destroyed our way of life.”
History professor Jim Klein, who chairs the Sierra Club Coastal Bend chapter, was just days from assuming a position on the Corpus Christi City Council when the 2022 oil spill happened. He recalled walking on beaches with his wife and observing yellow gelatinous globs floating on the water, clinging to the sand. He couldn’t believe other beachgoers had no idea that crude oil was seeping into their beaches and lives.
“I think the city could have, and should have, done a better job of making the public aware of the spill,” he told The Xylom. “There seemed to be an effort to try and downplay the seriousness of the spill.”
So, how did Ingleside on the Bay, home to some of the most lavish homes in the Coastal Bend area, turn into a fenceline community?
Before there was Enbridge, Flint Hills, or Gibson, Ingleside on the Bay was a neighbor to the Naval Station Ingleside. In 1992, it opened as the Navy’s Mine Warfare Force home port, stationing 3,400 personnel at its peak and providing a stable source of service jobs.
However, the Federal Base Realignment and Closure Commission voted to close NS Ingleside in 2005. Troops left one by one until only 100 personnel remained when the Navy returned the site to Port Corpus Christi in 2010.
Residents were cautiously optimistic about pulling the area with nearly 1,000 acres of newly freed waterfront land out of its nadir: A 2005 Chron. article said locals alternatively imagined the space as a community college, an office park, or even a cruise pier. It helped that in 2006, the Texas Historical Commission concurred with a state archaeologist’s determination that McGloin’s Bluff, a buffer zone between Ingleside on the Bay and NS Ingleside where tens of thousands of Indigenous artifacts were excavated, should be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Unbeknownst to Coastal Bend residents, public officials were rolling out the red carpet for their neighbors who had already struck black gold twice.
In the mid-aughts, fracking technique refinements enabled the U.S. to precisely drill for more oil and gas where it would’ve been infeasible earlier. Two Texas regions benefited from the shale oil boom: The Permian Basin, which spans 75,000 square miles across West Texas and southeastern New Mexico, and the Eagle Ford Formation, a 400-mile-long, 50-mile-wide band beginning in East Texas that snakes between Corpus Christi and San Antonio to the Mexican border.
As U.S. crude oil production doubled between 2009 and 2015, Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican who touted global warming as a “net benefit” for humankind on C-SPAN, sponsored H.R. 702 in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, where he formerly chaired the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, to repeal an export ban on crude oil. The bill passed with only six Republican “no” votes, despite veto threats from the Obama Administration.
Since the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford Formation are landlocked, the oil had to reach the ocean somewhere. With hundreds of acres of undeveloped former naval property land, Ingleside on the Bay became highly desirable as a crude oil export hub. Furthermore, it is much closer to Aransas Pass, the only exit to the Gulf of Mexico, than Corpus Christi. Charlie Boone, the President of the Coastal Watch Association, recalled attending a pilot board meeting where it was discussed that oil tankers using the La Quinta Channel turning basin would save around five to ten hours, significantly reducing manpower and fuel costs.
Port Corpus Christi, anticipating these legislative maneuvers, engineered three separate land sales totaling more than $100 million: Flint Hills would take the former base’s pier and upgrade it, while Houston-headquartered Oxy would get the rest of NS Ingleside.
The sale was marked by two quirks: First, Corpus Christi has jurisdiction over all of Corpus Christi Bay’s waters, right up to the San Patricio County shoreline. Second, Corpus Christi and Nueces County each hold three seats in the seven-member Port Corpus Christi Commission; San Patricio County has one.
This meant that south shore power brokers from Corpus Christi and its surroundings could place petrochemical facilities far away from view and still collect millions of dollars in sales and taxes. Even if San Patricio County public officials and residents in towns like Ingleside on the Bay objected, they would not have any political recourse.
Wes Hoskins, the San Patricio County Appointee to the Commission, declined to be interviewed and forwarded the interview request to Port Corpus Christi staff, who did not respond as of the time of publication."
As Congressional Republicans and the White House remained in an impasse, then-Port Corpus Christi Executive Director John P. LaRue remained upbeat. In an interview with the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, he said that the base’s new owners may be well-positioned if the decades-old federal ban on crude exports is lifted.
And he was right: intent on avoiding a government shutdown, Democratic congressional leaders held secret talks with Republican counterparts and reached a grand bargain. In exchange for an “unprecedented” tax incentive for wind and solar power, Obama would reverse over four decades of energy policy with a stroke of a pen.
Fittingly, the first barrel of exported crude oil set sail from Port Corpus Christi on Dec. 31st, 2015.
At the time of the repeal, the Caller-Times glowingly described the town of Ingleside, which abuts Ingleside on the Bay to the north and the east, as “reborn,” excited at the prospect of oil companies reviving the city. As a result, many residents were oblivious.
“I retired here right at the beginning of the embargo being lifted,” Boone recalls. “I came here to fish and play the guitar. I was having a good time.”
When Ingleside on the Bay’s former executive director Cyndi Valdes bought her house in 2019, Flint Hills was just beginning an expansion that would almost double Ingleside Terminal’s loading capacity and increase its storage capacity by 40%. Moda Midstream Operating, another Houston-based corporation, had purchased the Ingleside Energy Center’s six oil tanks from Oxy the previous year. The South Texas Gateway was a year away from beginning operations under the auspices of Buckeye Partners.
Since then, Enbridge Ingleside Energy Center has had five expansions, bringing the number of oil tanks to 36, with five more under construction. Three more crude oil pipelines were built between 2019 and 2020, bringing the total to five.
“It used to be that we would be out here, and one [oil tanker] would go by every four days. We’re like, ‘Oh, look!’,” Boone described. “It’s 10 a day or more, just back and forth, back and forth.”
By November 2021, Valdes had started to notice changes as well. “I had already noticed in that short amount of time, the more frequent ships, the noise and the lights and the smells coming from Enbridge,” she says.
Troubled by what they could see, and even more so by what they thought they couldn’t, Coastal Watch Association contacted Earthworks, a national nonprofit that aims to prevent the destructive impacts of energy extraction through civic mobilization and education. Using special cameras that observe chemicals normally invisible to the naked eye, Earthworks found several volatile organic compounds — which can cause respiratory system irritation, nervous system damage, and even cancer — leaking out from Flint Hills Ingleside.
Yet, even as it dawned on the residents of Ingleside on the Bay that their land, air, and water were increasingly tainted, nothing had prepared them for the events of Dec. 25th, 2022 and Jan. 6th, 2024.
After the 2022 spill, Ingleside on the Bay residents realized that oil and gas expansion was no longer a mere curiosity or a cause of concern, but an existential threat. The 2024 spill further reinforced the reality that oil spills and chemical discharges were not just outliers, but a daily presence of their lives.
Numerous national databases allow residents to look up areas of elevated health risks by industrial air pollution, including the Risk Screening Environmental Indicators database, Air Toxics Screening Assessment, ProPublica’s ToxMap, and EJ Screen, which was recently deleted by the second Trump administration but archived by a grassroots group. Ingleside on the Bay ranked near the 90th percentile of Superfund proximity and drinking water non-compliance. However, these dashboards, some with datasets last updated in 2018, don’t fully capture the environmental health risks of the breakneck pace of oil and gas expansion.
In March 2024, a joint investigation by The Texas Tribune, Environmental Health News, and palabra. found flaws within the Texas ambient air monitoring system, one of the largest in the country. The 228-station network has seven ambient air sensors in Corpus Christi, including the only automated gas chromatograph in a 15-county region measuring volatile organic compound levels, but it doesn’t measure many known pollutants from nearby petrochemical facilities, nor is the information gathered easily interpretable by residents. In another 2023 investigation, Grist reporters found that Oxbow Calcining, a company owned by William “Bill” Koch, exploited its access to real-time Texas air monitor data to selectively turn facilities off wherever the wind blew at the air monitor, likely violating the Clean Air Act. (Bill Koch has no ownership or involvement in Flint Hills Resources, a subsidiary of Koch, Inc.)
Ingleside on the Bay slipped through the cracks of these investigations, however, because San Patricio County doesn’t even have any ambient air sensors for compliance monitoring. Instead, as a representative from the TCEQ would later confirm in a notice and comment hearing, the agency relies on industry to self-report data. A September 2023 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General report criticized agencies, including the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), for poor oversight and limited enforcement, particularly with unlawfully allowing other Coastal Bend area petrochemical facilities to rely solely on modeling that masks the extent of cancer-causing benzene emissions.
Texas is updating its Ambient Air Monitoring Network, but Ingleside on the Bay is left out. Here’s how you can speak up for your community.
States are required to conduct a network assessment every five years to comply with federal monitoring requirements. The Texas 2025 Five-Year Ambient Air Monitoring Network Assessment, prepared by the TCEQ, evaluates whether individual network monitors should be added, relocated, or decommissioned. However, the draft Five-Year Assessment did not recommend the addition of any monitors at Ingleside on the Bay; in fact, there are currently no sensors across San Patricio County, Texas.
A 30-day public comment period for the draft Five-Year Assessment closes at 5:00 p.m. on June 30th, 2025. Written comment information, including your name, email address, and physical address, will become part of the agency’s public record.
Public comments can be submitted to the contact below:
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality
P.O. Box 13087
Attention: Holly Landuyt, MC-165
Austin, Texas 78711-3087
Or sent via email to: tceqamnp@tceq.texas.gov
The final Texas 2025 Five-Year Ambient Monitoring Network Assessment will be submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and posted on TCEQ’s webpage on July 1st, 2025. The response to comments, along with the comments, will be posted on the TCEQ’s webpage on September 2nd, 2025. Comments received on the 2025 Five-Year Ambient Monitoring Network Assessment will be considered during the development of the TCEQ’s 2026 Annual Monitoring Network Plan.
Even with these caveats, in the two most recent years where the EPA’s Enforcement and Compliance History Online database has publicly available data, Flint Hills increased its benzene emissions by 45% and quadrupled its toxic ethylbenzene and xylene emissions between 2021 and 2022;, it also shipped 176 times more hazardous waste in 2023 than in 2022. The observation that air pollution dramatically shifted from the south shore to the north correlated with Port Corpus Christi’s imbalanced power structure.
What the EPA deemed were Flint Hills’ high-priority violations of the Clean Air Act were not addressed for fifteen months between December 2021 and March 2023. When the TCEQ finally took enforcement action, Flint Hills was fined $21,800, equal to the worth of crude oil exported in less than two minutes. A year later, the Commission agreed to a five-year renewal of Flint Hills’ Federal Operating Permit.
Residents and advocates are currently tightening their scrutiny on Enbridge, whose own Federal Operation Permit O-3906, first issued in 2018 before any of the Moda and Enbridge-led expansions, is up for renewal.
Info Box: How do I submit a public petition if I am affected by Enbridge’s crude oil export operations?
Public petitions related to Enbridge’s Title V permit renewal should be submitted to the TCEQ, Enbridge, and the EPA by Tuesday, May 27th. Instructions on submitting a public petition to the Environmental Protection Agency are available at the EPA website.
According to the Texas Clean Air Act, “The petition shall be based only on objections to the permit raised with reasonable specificity during the public comment period, unless you demonstrate that it was impracticable to raise such objections within the public comment period, or the grounds for such objections arose after the public comment period.”
Public petitions should be submitted during the petition period to the TCEQ and Enbridge at the following addresses:
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality
Office of Air
Air Permits Division, MC-163
P.O. Box 13087
Austin, Texas 78711-3087
Mr. Luis G Perez
VP US Gulf Coast Terminals Operations
Enbridge Ingleside LLC
915 N Eldridge Pkwy Ste 1100
Houston, Texas 77079-2703
In December 2023, Inside Climate News and The Texas Tribune reported how Enbridge consultant Sharon Jones successfully requested the TCEQ to split the Ingleside Energy Center’s contiguous oil and gas operations into separately permitted sites after three failed attempts by attaching a memo that copied a former TCEQ executive director-turned-lobbyist. Enbridge was accused by the Coastal Watch Association and Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit composed of former EPA enforcement attorneys, analysts, and investigators, of having bypassed public notice or opportunity for public comment, exploiting the legal distinction between major and minor pollution sources to avoid more stringent permitting.
“They have so many violations, and they’re trying to split it. They’re not fixing the violations because they want to show that they need more of a permit,” Wilder says.
Ingleside on the Bay residents did score a small win by demanding that their legislators request a TCEQ Notice and Comment Hearing in Portland, Texas, a 25-minute drive northwest.
The bipartisan delegation at the time consisted of Democratic State Senator Morgan LaMantia and Republican State Representative J.M. Lozano. LaMantia, a freshman, had eked out a slim win for her term in the state’s only battleground district by 659 votes. Lozano switched parties in 2012 citing a pro-oil-and-gas development record; he once claimed that if the EPA and then-President Obama had their way, San Patricio County and other countries he represented would be “ghost towns.” However, he has fiercely opposed H.B. 4640, a defeated 2021 bill that he claimed would have given Port Corpus Christi even broader powers to lease and develop the land it owns.
Neither LaMantia nor Lozano responded to written interview requests.
Driving to Portland in Valdes’s golden Toyota minivan after the detour to the crude oil export terminals, highway construction projects, garden-style apartments, and wind turbines dot the horizon. When the crude oil export ban was repealed, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi predicted that the environmental damage from exporting would be offset by 10 times because of other measures in the bill.
Indeed, as of 2023, Texas produces nearly three times more electricity from wind than any other state. In a press release dated March 31st, 2023, Enbridge Executive Vice President Colin Gruending even claimed that the Ingleside Energy Center would be retrofitted to run on solar power. However, in less than a year, Enbridge would backtrack on its solar plans, scrubbing most mentions of the project from its site.
As the sun sets, the Coastal Bend is still bright: floodlights from petrochemical facilities beam through the night as operations continue overnight.
Don’t miss Part 3: A rainbow coalition of Texas Coastal Bend residents tried every tool in the regulatory process to stop the crude oil export industry. Did they ever have agency?
Reporting of this story was supported by the Society of Environmental Journalists, Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources and the Kelly-Douglas Fund at the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Lai Wa Chu and Jaime Diaz contributed research to the story.
CORRECTION MAY 27th, 2025: A previous version of the story inaccurately described Oxbow Calcining’s ownership. It is owned by William “Bill” Koch, who has no ownership or involvement in Flint Hills Resources, a subsidiary of Koch, Inc.
