US Desalination LLC and IDE Technologies have formed a new joint venture, RGV-Desal LLC, to advance a proposed seawater desalination plant in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley that would produce up to 50 million gallons per day.
Announced April 23, the company would oversee the design, financing and long-term operation of the facility, which it describes as a major “drought-proof” addition to municipal and industrial water supplies in the South Padre Island area.
IDE Technologies is a leading desalination developer based in Israel with a long history of designing and operating large-scale seawater treatment plants globally, including the record-breaking Carlsbad plant in Southern California, which opened in 2015 and now provides 10% of the regional water supply. Its participation reflects its role as a technology provider and co-developer, while Houston-based US Desalination LLC serves as a national partner.
The project is described as a roughly $1 billion private investment, with initial conceptual materials indicating it could be expanded to 100 million gallons per day in later phases, according to the Rio Grande Valley Business Journal. The outlet also reports that developers have secured land near the planned second causeway to South Father Island and discussed routing a transportation pipeline along the new bridge structure.
The companies say the plant would rely on seawater reverse osmosis backed by energy recovery systems to reduce the facility’s substantial energy demand. Although developers have referenced a three-to-five-year development period, no permitting agency has confirmed a timeline, and no detailed milestones have been released beyond the initial announcement.
The proposal builds on decades of regional interest in desalination. The Texas Water Development Board has noted that the Laguna Madre Water District previously explored marine desalination as a strategy to address recurring hydrologic volatility in the Lower Rio Grande region. According to The Monitor and Valley Morning Star, judges in Cameron and Hidalgo counties have publicly supported the project, citing long-term water supply issues and the declining reliability of Rio Grande flows.
Despite the scale of the project, stakeholders say a lack of technical detail remains a central issue. No information has been released on dam design, brine management, or site-specific environmental impacts. The Sierra Club’s Cyrus Reed said the absence of publicly available data makes it difficult to assess the proposal’s footprint, adding that “the devil is in the details.”
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