Oil Ports and Hurricanes Along the Texas Gulf Coast

This chapter considers vulnerability to hurricanes as a factor that over the twentieth century shaped the Texas Gulf Coast as a region of oil and gas ports. Projects to open Texas’s shallow bays and estuaries to ocean shipping preceded the 1901 Spindletop strike, which set in motion Texas’s transformation into a global hub for the energy sector. Nevertheless, organizers of the early Texas oil industry quickly identified three major deep-water channels built in the 1910s–1920s—the 52-mile Houston Ship Channel, the Sabine-Neches Waterway at Beaumont-Port Arthur, and the 20-mile Corpus Christi Ship Channel—as exemplary locations for the processing and shipping stages of their enterprise. These waterways, along with shorter channels added later at Freeport, Matagorda Bay, and Brownsville, offered ample space for freight yards, pipelines, storage tanks, refineries, loading docks, petrochemical plants, equipment fabricators, and other support industries. Storm protection provided an argument for the arduous, expensive extension of navigation inland. Yet industries and port authorities repeatedly rationalized exposed locations close to the coast when business strategy seemed to demand this. As recent storms from Ike in 2008 to Harvey in 2017 and Beryl in 2024 portend, the concentration of Texas’s industrial petroleumscape along dredged channels has created conditions for environmental cataclysm. The continent’s largest, most strategic petroleum and petrochemical complex becomes ever more vulnerable to storm surges and flooding, whose frequency and intensity increase because of carbon-driven climate change. Oil and gas made the modern Gulf Coast but threatened what it made. The globalized character of the oil industry, of course, means that this bleak dynamic looms over port cities on every continent. Much US discussion of the exposure of people and property to coastal disasters focuses on residential or resort development in Florida and elsewhere. Along the Texas Gulf Coast, the key factor drawing investment and population into harm’s way has been the fossil fuel energy regime and its commercial and industrial infrastructure.