Port Lavaca, Texas — Few people still fish for a living on the Gulf Coast of Texas. The work is hard and pay is meager. In the hearts of rundown seaside towns, dilapidated harbors barely recall the communities that thrived here generations ago.
But at the docks of Port Lavaca, one group of humble fishermen just got a staggering $20 million to bring back their timeless way of life. They’re buying out the buyer of their catch, starting the largest oyster farm in Texas and dreaming big for the first time in a long time.
“We have a lot of hope,” said Jose Lozano, 46, who docks his oyster boats in Port Lavaca. “Things will get better.”
Texas has long ranked at the top of the list for the best states to run a business and the worst for quality of life and working conditions. Almost one out of every five Texans does not have health insurance. We are the only state in the country that allows private-sector employers to opt out of providing workers’ compensation. Despite having a $33 billion surplus to put toward improving life for all Texans, our state lawmakers instead chose to spend the most recent regular legislative session attacking workers’ rights, immigrants, public schools, transgender people, voting access, and higher education.
The fishers in Gulf of Mexico waters off Cameron Parish, Louisiana, estimate their catch has fallen catastrophically from 1 million tons a season to 150,000 tons since the first liquefied natural gas terminal in the parish began operating eight years ago.
Now, a new industry is being developed in the waters that were once the most productive grounds in the nation for fish, shrimp, and oysters.
A company called OnStream CO2 is developing the GeoDura hub, which it says could hold millions of tons of carbon dioxide captured from fossil fuel industries, including LNG terminals, a mile or more below the waters off Cameron Parish’s shores. It would be among the first of its kind in the United States. Currently, there are just a handful of projects in the world developing offshore carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS.
“These people are book smart, but when it comes to common sense, they have nothing,” said Travis Dardar about the project. Dardar is a Cameron-based fisher and founder of the group Fishermen Involved in Sustaining our Heritage, or FISH.
According to a report from the Center for International Environmental Law, in the best-case scenario, the injection of captured carbon may temporarily disrupt fisheries because of drilling and seismic testing.
In the worst-case scenario, underwater carbon sequestration wells could fail and release the stored carbon, killing off the plants, fish, and even the people in boats in the waters above. Storing carbon also has potential global implications, if, as opponents claim, carbon capture and sequestration will allow the fossil fuel industry to maintain the status quo as one of the world’s top emitters of greenhouse gasses.
A man fishes in Sabine Pass in Texas, across from a tanker carrying liquefied natural gas docked at Cheniere’s LNG export facility in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, in June 2024. Julie Dermansky / Julie Dermansky LLC
The federal government, which is supporting the GeoDura hub with a recently announced $26 million award, and geologists who have studied carbon storage say offshore sequestration projects make a lot of sense.
But as with other climate change mitigation efforts supported by the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law — such as hydrogen and direct air capture — the effectiveness of offshore carbon storage is unclear. Worries and claims on both sides of the offshore carbon capture debate are mostly hypothetical, based on modeling and just a few existing offshore storage sites.
Gulf offshore carbon storage pushed
The geology of the Gulf of Mexico combined with the fossil fuel-heavy industries along the coasts of Louisiana and Texas make carbon capture and sequestration under the Gulf “the single best opportunity for developing a CCS industry in the United States that can effectively address national emission reduction strategies at the required scale,” University of Texas at Austin research scientist Tip Meckel told a congressional committee in 2022.
Acknowledging that potential, Congress directed federal agencies to develop regulations to permit carbon storage under federal offshore waters. Draft regulations, requested by November 2022, have yet to be issued. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management told Floodlight it will issue its first draft of a proposed rule this year.
In the meantime, companies have focused on developing carbon storage in the state waters off Louisiana, stretching 3.5 miles from the shore, and Texas, which controls the waters for about 10 miles from the shoreline.
Meckel says there are 10 proposed projects in the two states, including GeoDura. Louisiana, unlike Texas, has the authority to permit carbon storage underground, including under state waters.
Abandoned, idle, and unused wells are a recognized risk for offshore carbon storage, just as it is onshore. Ocean Conservancy Report: Protecting the Ocean and Taxpayers by Strengthening Standards for Offshore Oil and Gas Decommissioning
But the development of carbon storage in waters near the coast raises concerns about the higher number of abandoned, idle, or older oil and gas wells closer to shore that could allow stored carbon to leak out through existing wells. There are also questions about whether Louisiana would do a good job permitting and regulating carbon storage.
“I can’t say it cannot be done, but the history of this technology, the history of the lack of pollution monitoring in the Gulf and in Louisiana waters in particular, we are extremely skeptical,” said Scott Eustis, community science director for Healthy Gulf, a Louisiana-based community and environmental advocacy group.
Land grabs onshore and off
The concept of storing carbon under offshore waters was supercharged by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which increased tax credits for capturing and permanently storing carbon underground from $39 per ton to $85. The incentive spurred a rush of development in the United States, with about 125 new carbon capture, transport, or storage projects announced since 2022, according to the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit that focuses on solutions to the climate crisis.
The incentives also sparked a land grab in Louisiana and Texas, with companies competing to purchase rights for underground storage onshore, often acquiring multiple parcels from multiple landowners to have access to a single deep reservoir for carbon storage.
With offshore sites, though, a developer usually only has to deal with a single landowner, the state or federal government.
Offshore carbon storage projects, like the GeoDura hub proposed off Cameron Parish, Louisiana, would receive carbon captured from industrial facilities and piped to their sites to be injected a mile or more below ground. Global CCS Institute
In August 2023, Castex Carbon Solutions signed an agreement with Louisiana for the rights to store carbon underneath 24,000 acres off Cameron Parish, around Monkey Island, at an initial cost of $7.25 million. Additional millions will flow to the state when the project begins injecting carbon. Castex is one of the partners of the GeoDura hub, along with Carbonvert and Enbridge.
The OnStream CO2 collaboration says the hub will have the capacity to store 250 million metric tons of captured carbon, or the annual emissions from 58 million gas-powered cars. It has signed a contract with Commonwealth LNG in Cameron Parish to store the 9 million tons of carbon Commonwealth expects to capture each year from its terminal after it is operational.
Venture Global has signed similar, but less initially lucrative, contracts with the state to store captured carbon from its Calcasieu Pass and Plaquemines LNG facilities under waters off Calcasieu Parish and Barataria Bay, respectively.
The carbon captured from an LNG terminal, which super chills and liquefies natural gas for transport, equals just about 8.8 percent of the carbon emissions created by the LNG industry, according to a lifecycle analysis published by Cornell University Professor Robert Howarth. Howarth’s study, which has been attacked by oil and gas companies and House Republicans, concluded that LNG is worse for the climate than burning coal.
Offshore CCS raises a litany of concerns
OnStream says its project will be operational in 2028. In addition to completing a geologic assessment of the site — funded in part by the Department of Energy grant — the company will need to build a pipeline to move captured carbon from the nearby industrial hubs of Lake Charles, Louisiana, and Port Arthur, Texas. It will also need to obtain a permit to inject the carbon from the state of Louisiana.
Louisiana is the third state, and the first with a coastline, to receive permission from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to permit carbon sequestration wells. Patrick Courreges, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Energy and Natural Resources, said the state will be examining the same things in offshore carbon sequestration projects as it does for the onshore projects.
“What our folks are looking for is confining layers,” he said. “Clay, shale, something real thick and non-permeable that’s not going to allow anything to bubble up past it. Whether you’re offshore, onshore, that geology below ground is what we’re looking at.”
The state will also examine the construction of wells and pipes to move the carbon, he said, adding that the offshore wells also will have to be built to handle hurricanes and storm surges.
Another concern, acknowledged by both sides, is the possibility the injected carbon will come back out through abandoned, idle, or older wells. Such concentrated carbon could kill vegetation, sea life, and possibly even the fishers in the waters above.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, or NETL, has issued contracts to study possible offshore carbon capture and sequestration sites in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. NETL
Debra James, a spokesperson for OnStream, told Floodlight there are no existing wells directly above the storage site.
“Technical evaluations show that the CO2 will not interact with wellbores near the project area,” she said.
Environmental advocates have a litany of other concerns, including that drilling and the injection of carbon could cause seismic activity in the region, a hotspot of industry. Meckel told Floodlight that “we do not anticipate much induced seismicity.”
These advocates are also concerned the storage of carbon under or near coastal marshes could damage the thousands of acres of wetlands along the Louisiana coast, which are already disappearing at a rate of 25 to 35 square miles a year.
Louisiana “is spending millions of dollars to protect the coast in one area, and then another area, they’re permitting the wholesale destruction of it. That is just totally inconsistent,” said Anne Rolfes, director of the environmental group Louisiana Bucket Brigade.
Brian Lezina, chief of planning for the Louisiana Coastal Restoration Protection Authority, said it’s the responsibility of the state’s Department of Energy and Natural Resources to ensure carbon storage along the state shorelines is done correctly. He added that the coastal agency — which has a stalled $3 billion project to help rebuild wetlands in Barataria Bay — will be paying attention to the activity.
Technology largely untested
There are just a handful of operating subsea carbon sequestration projects in the world, and none in the United States.
Two offshore carbon storage projects off Norway’s coast have been called a success. But in 2023, the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis published a study pointing out that even in those two projects — in what the institute called some of the most studied offshore waters — the storage of carbon yielded some unwelcome surprises.
In one of the fields, the carbon unexpectedly migrated out of where it was injected, though it has remained underground. Injection into a second field had to be halted when the reservoir reached capacity 15 years before anticipated.
The research “has revealed that storing carbon dioxide underground is not an exact science,” the report said. “It may carry even more risk and uncertainty than drilling for oil or gas, given the very limited practical, long-term experience of permanently keeping CO2 in the ground.”
Dardar hasn’t followed the offshore carbon debate closely. But the way he sees it, the presence of any more industry in his corner of Louisiana is “just no good, all the way around.”
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KPRC-TV reporter Gage Goulding was shoved and his camera smacked out of his hands while reporting at a Houston-area used-car dealership in Pasadena, Texas, on Dec. 5, 2024.
In a report for the outlet, Goulding recounted that he and photojournalist Oscar Chavez went to the business to investigate a young woman’s allegations that she was conned out of $1,500 when trying to buy a car.
Goulding reportedly went undercover as a potential customer to see whether he’d have a similar experience.
“Wearing a microphone, but without a camera, Goulding got the keys to a Jeep and with the salesman, started the engine and talked about test-driving the vehicle,” KPRC-TV reported. “At that point, he informed the salesman who he was and why he was there.”
In recordings of the exchange that followed, the salesman is heard inviting Goulding inside to speak with the manager, David Estrada. Goulding — with Chavez following behind with a camera — began asking Estrada about the woman’s experience.
“When we do these stories and confront businesses, we usually are met with one simple answer: Please leave. And we do, we abide by that,” Goulding reported. “But this story was different from the get-go.”
Estrada stood and without warning placed his hand on Chavez’s camera and began pushing the photojournalist outside. Outside the office, Estrada continued grabbing the camera while Goulding yelled for him not to touch their equipment and Chavez said that they were leaving.
“Meanwhile, the car salesman is grabbing (Chavez’s) camera, twisting his arm and throwing elbows,” Goulding said in his report.
Estrada also smacked Goulding’s phone “through the air” and pinned Chavez in the journalists’ vehicle.
Neither journalist responded to requests for additional comment.
KPRC-TV reported that Estrada was arrested that day on two counts of assault. Estrada is also facing unrelated charges for allegedly embezzling more than $140,000 from another dealership, according to the station.
The woman whose experience sparked the investigation was contacted by the dealership and told she would be overnighted a check for the full $1,500.
“The goal of this story wasn’t to create any drama,” Goulding reported. “It was to get answers for (the woman) and her family. And the good news is: We did get those answers.”
KPRC-TV photojournalist Oscar Chavez was grabbed, pushed and elbowed multiple times while reporting at a Houston-area used-car dealership in Pasadena, Texas, on Dec. 5, 2024.
In a report for the outlet, reporter Gage Goulding recounted that he and Chavez went to the business to investigate a young woman’s allegations that she was conned out of $1,500 when trying to buy a car.
Goulding reportedly went undercover as a potential customer to see whether he’d have a similar experience.
“Wearing a microphone, but without a camera, Goulding got the keys to a Jeep and with the salesman, started the engine and talked about test-driving the vehicle,” KPRC-TV reported. “At that point, he informed the salesman who he was and why he was there.”
In recordings of the exchange that followed, the salesman is heard inviting Goulding inside to speak with the manager, David Estrada. Goulding — with Chavez following behind with a camera — began asking Estrada about the woman’s experience.
“When we do these stories and confront businesses, we usually are met with one simple answer: Please leave. And we do, we abide by that,” Goulding reported. “But this story was different from the get-go.”
Estrada stood and without warning placed his hand on Chavez’s camera and began pushing the photojournalist outside. Outside the office, Estrada continued grabbing the camera while Goulding yelled for him not to touch their equipment and Chavez said that they were leaving.
“Meanwhile, the car salesman is grabbing (Chavez’s) camera, twisting his arm and throwing elbows,” Goulding said in his report.
Estrada also smacked Goulding’s phone “through the air” and pinned Chavez in the journalists’ vehicle.
Neither journalist responded to requests for additional comment.
KPRC-TV reported that Estrada was arrested that day on two counts of assault. Estrada is also facing unrelated charges for allegedly embezzling more than $140,000 from another dealership, according to the station.
The woman whose experience sparked the investigation was contacted by the dealership and told she would be overnighted a check for the full $1,500.
“The goal of this story wasn’t to create any drama,” Goulding reported. “It was to get answers for (the woman) and her family. And the good news is: We did get those answers.”
Digital news outlet 404 Media was subpoenaed by the state of Texas on Oct. 22, 2024, in connection with an ongoing lawsuit against Google in Midland County’s district court, according to court filings reviewed by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Google in 2022 on the state’s behalf, alleging that the company captured the biometric data of millions of its users in Texas without obtaining consent.
The subpoena to 404 Media seeks communications and documents from investigative journalist Joseph Cox’s article on a leak from Google, including a copy of an internal Google database obtained by the outlet “which tracks six years worth of potential privacy and security issues.”
In an announcement, 404 Media’s founders wrote, “Paxton’s subpoena seeks to turn 404 Media into an arm of law enforcement, which is not our role and which we have no interest in doing or becoming.”
They added that attorneys representing the outlet “vociferously objected” to the subpoena on Dec. 6. The court filing, reviewed by the Tracker, argues the news organization is protected from having to disclose the information by the First Amendment, as well as laws in California — where the outlet is based — and Texas.
404 Media’s founders, who declined to comment further when reached by the Tracker, wrote that the subpoena undermines a free and independent press and demonstrates an alarming trend.
“It also highlights the fact that the alarm bells that have been raised about legal attacks on journalists in a second Trump administration are not theoretical; politicians already feel emboldened to use the legal system to target journalists,” they wrote. “Paxton’s subpoena highlights the urgency of passing the PRESS Act, a federal shield law that has already passed the House and which has bipartisan support but which Democrats in the Senate have dragged their feet on for inexplicable and indefensible reasons.”
Paxton had previously sought records from Media Matters for America using a “civil investigative demand” — a type of administrative subpoena — in 2023 as part of a probe his office launched to investigate “potential fraudulent activity” by the media company. A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction forbidding Paxton from pursuing Media Matters’ reporting materials.
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Texas Democrats have long viewed the state’s growing Latino population as their ticket to eventually breaking through the Republican Party’s dominance. Tuesday night, however, showed that the GOP has made significant gains in peeling away those voters, and nowhere was that more apparent than along the border.
After years of losing the statewide Latino vote by double digits, Republicans set a high-water mark with Donald Trump capturing 55% of the critical voting bloc, besting Vice President Kamala Harris’ 44% share, according to exit polls.
In the traditionally Democratic strongholds along the border, Trump managed a near sweep.
He won 14 out of the 18 counties within 20 miles of the border, a number that doubled his attention-grabbing 2020 performance in the Latino-majority region. He carried all four counties in the Rio Grande Valley just eight years after drawing a mere 29% in the region — a feat that included delivering 97% Latino Starr County to Republicans for the first time since 1896. And, though he lost El Paso, one of the border’s most populous counties, he narrowed margins there in ways not seen in decades.
Counties Along the Border Continue to Flip
Trump was the top vote-getter in a majority of the counties along the Texas-Mexico border in 2024. This continues the trend of border counties voting more conservatively in presidential races. Shown is how many counties have voted for each party’s candidate in each race since 1996.
Note: Unofficial results for 2024.
(Source: Texas Secretary of State. Map: Dan Keemahill/ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.)
His gains along the border were the most for a Republican presidential candidate in at least 30 years, exceeding even the inroads made by native Texan George W. Bush in 2004.
Trump’s success in appealing to heavily Latino communities was evident throughout the country as he became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Miami-Dade County in more than three decades and nearly doubled his share of the Latino vote in Pennsylvania, even after a comedian at one of his rallies called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” But Trump’s performance is particularly striking in Texas, where Democrats have all but tied their fate to the idea that, as long as the state’s Latino electorate continued to grow and stayed reliably blue, Republicans would one day cease to win statewide elections.
In addition to dominating the presidential race, Republicans saw other gains along the border. U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, a Republican from Edinburg, held onto a key GOP seat anchored in the Rio Grande Valley, and Republicans picked up a state Senate seat and two state House districts in South Texas that were previously held by Democrats. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who won reelection by carrying a majority of Latino voters, said the results amounted to “generational change.”
Democrats saw their own bright spots. Eddie Morales Jr., a state representative for a sprawling border district that stretches from Eagle Pass to El Paso, held onto his seat on Tuesday, though he narrowly eked out a victory two years after winning by a more comfortable 12-point margin. U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Laredo, also won by an unexpectedly narrow margin of about 5 percentage points against a GOP challenger whom he vastly outspent.
Joshua Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said it’s too early to tell if Republican gains will hold or extend beyond Trump himself. But, Blank said, Democrats would be wise to worry about the possibility that this shift endures.
Trump’s success among Latino voters seemed to stem from an understanding that, in places like Texas, many Latinos “think of themselves as multiracial” and have grown up in communities where race and ethnicity are not top of mind, Blank said. Trump targeted Hispanic men who rarely vote by appealing “to their pocketbooks, to their masculinity, to their place in culture and society, but not directly to an identity as a racial and ethnic minority.”
“Does that mean that these voters are going to stay in the Republican column? We don’t know. Does it mean that they’re going to support somebody who’s not named Donald Trump? Unclear,” Blank said. “But he has changed the terms of the debate in a way that I think Democrats are uncomfortable with.”
Border Counties Making Rightward Shift Toward Trump
Nine counties within 20 miles of the Texas-Mexico border flipped from supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 to Republican Donald Trump in 2024.
Note: Unofficial results for 2024.
(Source: Texas Secretary of State. Chart: Dan Keemahill/ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)
Not unlike his appeal among other constituencies, Trump won over Latino voters by hammering Harris on economic challenges that many of them — rightly and wrongly — blame on President Joe Biden.
University of Houston political science professor Jeronimo Cortina said Trump’s challenge now would be to deliver on his promises to improve voters’ economic fortunes. And he said he’d expect voters to hold Trump accountable if he doesn’t. Cortina noted that many Latinos supported Bush’s 2004 reelection, only to desert the Republican Party in favor of Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 amid a flailing economy.
“Realignments occur when there’s a sustainable change, and right now, it’s not clear we have that,” Cortina said.
He also said it would be premature to say whether Trump’s appeal — to say nothing of the Republican Party’s — was anything other than fleeting because, in local races, Latinos still tended to prefer Democrats.
One such example is the race for sheriff in Val Verde County, nearly three hours west of San Antonio.
In that race, Democrat Joe Frank Martinez held onto his seat, beating his Republican challenger after receiving 57% of the vote, even as Trump won the county with 63% of the vote.
According to Martinez, Project Red TX, a GOP-backed PAC, initially tried to get him to switch parties. When he declined, the PAC backed his opponent, who ran a campaign centered around the issue of immigration, even though that is not part of the sheriff’s job.
This year, the group supported more than 50 local candidates, primarily in border counties. The three candidates it backed in Val Verde County lost, though Wayne Hamilton, a veteran GOP operative who heads the group, noted that he also supported a number of local candidates who won their races with Trump carrying the county atop the ballot. One such case was in Jim Wells County, where Trump received 57% and the Democratic sheriff was narrowly ousted by a Republican challenger.
Hamilton said Latino voters living at or near the border flocked to Trump over what they see as the Biden administration’s “collapse in border enforcement and failing to do their job” by preventing more migrants from crossing into Texas.
Record numbers of arrivals overwhelmed border infrastructure in numerous communities. In Val Verde, some 20,000 mostly Haitian migrants arrived almost at once in 2021, forcing officials to shut the international port of entry while they figured out how to respond to the situation.
Public outcry was most acute, Hamilton said, in counties with high poverty rates where residents were more likely to feel that their community was “being overrun by people that are even poorer, with even greater needs.”
Hamilton celebrated that Trump flipped Starr by 16 points this year, a 76-point swing from his 60-point deficit there in 2016.
Down the ballot, though, Democrats, including the incumbent sheriff, managed to hold on to their positions despite aggressive campaigns on the Republican side. “All of those candidates that ran as Democrats, all won, so the Trump presidency is basically an isolated seat,” Starr County Democratic Chair Jessica Vera said.
Still, she said, if national and statewide Democrats want to keep the county blue, they need to work together with local leaders to connect with voters there.
Hamilton said some newly converted Trump voters might feel less inclined to vote against their local Democratic officials, especially in the smaller border counties, because they tend to be known in the community.
“The further down the ballot you go, it all becomes more personal,” Hamilton said. “It’s not a guy I see on TV, right? It’s the guy I go to Mass with.”
Local Democratic Party officials, including Sylvia Bruni in Webb County, a longtime Democratic stronghold, said they had warned their state and national headquarters about the advances Republicans were making in their districts. But she said she had gotten little support and instead had to rely almost entirely on whatever funds her group could raise on its own.
That’s not going to be good enough in the future, Bruni said. “We need help.”
This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .
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