In 2017, the oil industry, aided by Donald Trump’s Interior Department, set its sights on a swath of plains northwest of Corpus Christi. The 1,600 acres, located in and around Choke Canyon Reservoir, were deemed attractive by drillers who wanted to set up fracking operations there. The reservoir is located in the Eagle Ford Shale play, the state’s second richest oil field. The federal government could, if it so chose, auction off the parcels to the highest bidder, allowing drillers to frack the natural resources far below the ground.
Environmentalists and officials with the City of Corpus Christi sounded the alarm. They protested the sale, arguing that not enough investigation had been done to determine whether drilling would contaminate the reservoir, a crucial source of drinking water for the nearly half a million residents of Corpus Christi and 17 surrounding towns. They had good reason to worry, since a number of oil wells in the area that had purportedly been plugged had actually leaked into the reservoir, unbeknownst to residents. Opponents had already battled back a leasing plan for Choke Canyon in 2016, but this time their luck ran out; the government went ahead with the sale anyway.
Then, in 2020, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) auctioned off even more land around the lake. For four years, “they have brought up Choke Canyon over and over again [for auction],” says Rita Beving, an outreach coordinator for the nonprofit Clean Water Action who fought a similar proposal near Lake Lewisville in 2016. In that case, a coalition of cities and activists defeated the proposal by demonstrating how hydraulic fracturing, a technology that allows drillers to unlock vast reserves of oil and gas by pumping chemical-laden water into the earth, could critically weaken the lake’s aging dam. Beving chalked up the sales at Choke Canyon, at least in part, to a less robust opposition campaign than in Lewisville.
