Fri Oct 30 15:25:56 2026
(*4297a328*):: https://x.com/iancarrollshow/status/2116031902239121870? +public!
*** Ian Carroll (@IanCarrollShow) on X
*** This is literally why we have guns
*** X (formerly Twitter)
(*4cfb807c*):: review the twitter link, what company, what water supplies, who are the primary stakeholders and what are the nearby counties that are effected
(*23778ec9*):: Here’s what that thread is actually about. The Ian Carroll tweet quotes a post by James Li (“Israel is taking over the Texas water supply”) with a screenshot of an Inside Climate News article from Oct 28, 2026: “How Texas Could End Up Paying an Israeli Company Billions for Water.” I pulled the full article and fact-checked it.
THE COMPANY
IDE Technologies — a 60-year-old Israeli water treatment firm, formerly state-owned, privatized in the 1990s. It has built 400+ desalination plants in 40 countries. Its regional sales director for Texas, Mark Ellison, is a former Texas state official (Perry administration appointee, Texas-Israel Chamber of Commerce founding board member) — which is why the article spends time on his ties to Rick Perry and Greg Abbott.
THE PROJECT (this is what “taking over the water supply” refers to)
– Harbor Island desalination plant on Corpus Christi Bay, contract awarded to IDE this summer by the Nueces River Authority (NRA), a small state water agency.
– Up to 100 million gallons/day — would be the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere and the first in Texas.
– ~7 miles of sub-sea tunnels plus 200+ miles of pipeline running inland; combined cost estimate $6.4 billion (about half plant, half pipeline).
– Privately owned by IDE, not public — that’s the actual controversy. Corpus Christi had been trying (and failing) to build its own municipal plant for a decade.
PRIMARY STAKEHOLDERS
– Nueces River Authority — public face of the deal; its exec director John Byrum resigned in September amid a possible termination vote, and the agency was nearly out of money.
– IDE Technologies — private owner/operator, financing the plant privately.
– City of Corpus Christi — reserved 50 MGD for a $2.7M deposit; council is set to decide on a take-or-pay contract (pays whether it uses the water or not). Some council members (Rolando Barrera) oppose it on public-ownership grounds.
– Texas Water Development Board — awarded a $7M grant in a special 9-minute meeting after “the governor’s office directed” the funding (Abbott).
– Port of Corpus Christi Authority — pushed the private Harbor Island project against the city’s wishes; former port CEO Sean Strawbridge now runs US Desalination, partnered with IDE on a separate Brownsville plant.
– Industrial water users: Valero, OxyChem, Citgo, Flint Hills Resources, Cheniere (and Dow at the earlier Freeport attempt).
– Competing/adjacent players: CC Polymers (Taiwan/Indonesia/Mexico-owned complex selling 9 MGD to Corpus Christi starting next year), Kiewit (lost the city’s $1B contract), Poseidon Water, Seven Seas Water, EPCOR (Canadian, 27 MGD near Houston).
NEARBY COUNTIES AFFECTED
Directly named/impacted by the article: Nueces County (Corpus Christi), San Patricio County (Harbor Island sits across the bay near Portland), and Nueces County-adjacent Brownsville/Cameron County for the sister IDE project. The pipeline corridor runs 200+ miles inland to “the booming towns and cities of south Central Texas,” with the article specifically saying water will ultimately be distributed to “cities near Austin” — so the delivery/corridor impact spans the coastal bend through the Corpus Christi metro area up into the Austin/San Antonio growth corridor (the NRA’s own district covers Nueces, San Patricio, Jim Wells, Kleberg and surrounding basin counties). The article doesn’t enumerate every county on the pipeline route — that routing isn’t public yet; the NRA’s RFP wasn’t even made public.
One accuracy note on the framing: no Israeli entity is “taking over” an existing public supply — it’s a privately built and owned new plant that Texas cities would buy from, replacing the public route. The substance of the concern (a foreign private company holding a 20-30 year take-or-pay hold on a region’s water) is in the article; the “taking over” phrasing is the tweet’s spin.
(*4cfb807c*)::
One accuracy note on the framing: no Israeli entity is "taking over" an existing public supply — it's a privately built and owned new plant that Texas cities would buy from, replacing the public route. The substance of the concern (a foreign private company holding a 20-30 year take-or-pay hold on a region's water) is in the article; the "taking over" phrasing is the tweet's spin.
Re-validate this assertion
(*23778ec9*):: Re-validation against the full article text. My assertion holds on the narrow facts but was too dismissive on the framing — here’s the breakdown.
What checks out:
– No seizure of an existing system. Corpus Christi’s current water comes from its municipal system (surface reservoirs like Lake Corpus Christi/Choteau, Carrizo-Wilcox groundwater); IDE acquires none of that. Texas has zero operational desal plants today — this would be the first. So there is no existing desalinated supply being “taken over.”
– The plant is a new-build, private, foreign-owned facility; Corpus Christi would be a wholesale customer, not a customer of a seized utility. Correct.
What I got wrong or understated — three things:
1. The article’s own framing is far stronger than I conceded. The deck says IDE “hopes to revolutionize—and privatize—the state’s supply of water,” and the body says the project “would mark a dramatic transfer of the public water supply to private ownership.” Inside Climate News — not a fringe account — uses the words “transfer of the public water supply.” So “taking over the water supply” is an exaggeration, but it’s not invented spin; it’s a compressed reading of what the reporter explicitly writes. My phrasing made the article sound more neutral than it is.
2. I glossed the displacement mechanism, which is the actual “takeover” story. It’s not seizure — it’s crowding out: the city killed its own municipal plant (cancelled the $1B Kiewit contract) after the NRA (a public agency) hijacked the Harbor Island project from the Port, then steered the city toward reserving 50 MGD from IDE’s private plant. Public water development that would have been publicly owned and rate-financed is becoming a private foreign-owned purchase obligation. That is a supply takeover in effect, just operating on the future rather than the present.
3. “Privately owned by IDE” needed a correction: ownership is split. IDE finances/owns the plant; the NRA — a government agency — holds the Harbor Island lease, builds the pipeline with a $7M state grant directed by Abbott’s office, and collects millions in reservation fees from small cities and utility districts. So it’s a public-private arrangement where the public entity does the risk-laden groundwork while the private foreign firm captures the long-term wholesale supply position. Saying flatly “privately owned” oversimplified it.
The claims that survive unchanged: take-or-pay structure (“require Corpus Christi to pay for the water whether it needed it or not”), the 20–30 year contract-expiry concern from Councilman Barrera, the unknown price ($10–15 per 1,000 gallons floated to reservation holders — several times typical rates), and the fact that financing isn’t closed and the city hasn’t signed yet.
Revised verdict: “taking over the water supply” is technically false in the literal sense I defended (no existing system changes hands) but substantially true in the sense the article itself argues — a future regional water supply that would have been public is being routed into a 20-30 year take-or-pay dependency on a foreign private owner, with state power lubricating the deal. The claim I flagged as “spin” is closer to the article’s thesis than I allowed.
(*4cfb807c*):: Identify the leadership of IDE and any other partner entities that would be involved with the construction and administration of the plant, including any possible donor connections to political campaigns
(*23778ec9*):: (part 1/2)
Here’s the full leadership/partner map for the Harbor Island project, verified against IDE’s corporate site, Wikipedia, the ICN article, and Texas Tribune/KRIS coverage.
OWNER-LEVEL (IDE’s parent)
IDE is fully owned by Alfa Water Partners LLP, a private partnership that acquired IDE Group in 2017 (before that IDE was partly Delek Group-owned; it was state-owned until the 1990s).
– Avshalom Felber — Chairman & Founding Partner, Alfa Water Partners; Executive Chairman of IDE since 2018, earlier President/CEO from 2002. Ex-Deputy Director of the Israeli Ministry of Budget Department. Ranked #11 “world’s water expert” by Water World.
– Amir Lang — Founding Partner, CEO of IDE Group 2018–2022, now Executive Chairman of IDE Water & Technologies. Former EVP of Delek Group (Israel’s largest oil/gas/energy conglomerate, ticker DGRLY).
– IDE Water Assets — the development/O&M arm that will hold the plant asset; CEO Lihy Teurstein (the “Teuerstein” quoted in the June 1 IDE press release; spelled Teurstein in the ICN text — same person) spoke at the TWDB 2023 conference and pitched the Israel national-grid model to Texas officials.
– Behind Alfa: institutional limited partners with $200B+ AUM — Israel’s Teachers and Kindergarten Teachers Training Fund (largest national pension fund), Meitav (equity house), Clal Insurance, plus Ayalon and Hachshara insurers per third-party profiles. So the ultimate equity is largely Israeli pension/insurance money.
TEXAS OPERATIONS
– Mark Ellison — the pivotal figure. Regional Director for Business Development, IDE Technologies (Texas). Career: Assistant Commissioner of Agriculture under Rick Perry (1991) → Director, Texas Emerging Technology Fund (Perry appointee, 2005) → Associate VC for Economic Development, Texas A&M System (2008) → Special Advisor at Texas Water Development Board (2013) → Manager of Strategic Water Initiatives in the Governor’s office (Jan 2014, Perry again) → IDE Austin office 2015. Founding board member, Texas-Israel Chamber of Commerce (Perry created it; Ellison won its Chairman’s Award 2008). He led a sponsored delegation of Texas officials on an Israeli desalination tour in 2013, and 2015 was the same year Texas streamlined desal permitting and IDE opened its Austin office two blocks from the Capitol. That’s the revolving-door spine of the whole deal.
(*23778ec9*):: (part 2/2)
PARTNER / ADMINISTRATION ENTITIES
– Nueces River Authority — public counterparty; board president Eric Burnett (called it “largest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere”). Executive Director John Byrum retired effective Oct. 31, 2026, days before a closed-door board meeting on his employment, following an internal fight: former COO Travis Pruski resigned and accused Byrum of presenting inflated water-sales figures to the NRA board and Corpus Christi council, putting a ~$30M grant at risk; an outside investigation (May 2026) found “no intentional wrongdoing” but cited executive-team dysfunction. Board members voiced in the ICN piece: Dan Suckley (money-out warning), plus NRA hired Civitas Engineering Group to write the sealed January 2026 RFP.
– Civitas Engineering Group — NRA’s owner’s-engineer/RFP consultant.
– General contractor: not yet selected — Ellison told the Sept. 25 NRA board IDE hopes to pick one “in the coming months.”
– Shikun & Binui — Israeli construction/real-estate giant (largest commercial developer in Israel); IDE sought (and was denied, by Corpus Christi) a 45-day extension in 2024 to team with them. Likely IDE’s EPC partner but not confirmed for Harbor Island.
– US Desalination (Sean Strawbridge, ex-Port of Corpus Christi CEO) — IDE’s partner on the sister Port of Brownsville project, whose water feeds Rio Grande Valley public supplies. Strawbridge led the 2022 Port-sponsored delegation of state/local officials to Israel to tour IDE facilities.
– Texas Water Development Board — $7M state grant (Aug. 28 special meeting), explicitly “directed” by the Governor’s office; board member Brady Franks questioned the process. TWDB also runs SWIFT, the state loan pipeline IDE’s deal deliberately routes around.
POLITICAL CONNECTIONS / DONOR QUESTION — honest answer
I could not pull verified campaign-contribution records for Ellison, Strawbridge, Byrum, or IDE-affiliated entities: the Texas Ethics Commission public API rejected automated queries from this host, and Transparency USA blocked scraping. So I will not invent donation figures. What is documented in the public record is the influence channel, and it’s unusually well-documented:
– Direct gubernatorial direction: the TWDB grant minutes record staff saying “the governor’s office has directed” the award — Abbott’s office steering money to the NRA/IDE project.
– Abbott’s own history with IDE: he toured an IDE plant on his 2016 Israel trip, and IDE publicly announced Abbott’s “intention to partner with Israeli technology companies such as IDE.”
– Ellison’s career is a Perry-appointed position sequence ending at IDE — a classic regulator-to-vendor path, and 2013–2015 shows the lobbying and the favorable legislation (SWIFT, desal permitting streamlining) moving in lockstep.
– The Port’s Israel delegation (2022) was funded/sponsored by port officials taking state and local leaders abroad with IDE as the host.
– Broader context from the 2026 race cycle: the Tribune documented ~$9M to Abbott from data-center-linked donors while his administration regulates that sector — showing big-water/big-infrastructure donor influence on Abbott campaigns is an open story, but I found no reported contribution specifically tied to IDE or Ellison.
If you want the actual donor filings, the reliable path is the Texas Ethics Commission searchable database (ethics.state.tx.us) manually, or I can try again later from a browser session against their web UI — say the word and I’ll chase it.