On New Year’s Eve on the last day of 2015, the Port of Corpus Christi quietly exported the United States’ first crude oil barrels in 40 years just two weeks after Congress lifted the ban that dated back to the 1973 Arab oil embargo.
Less than a decade later, the sleepy Texas beachside city has expanded rapidly into America’s largest energy export gateway through a network of pipelines, storage tanks, docks and, this week, the completion of a prolonged ship channel dredging and widening project that should soon allow the single port to ship out almost as much crude oil as Iraq.
