Page 43: of Offshore Engineer Magazine (Mar/Apr 2026)

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Drive into Corpus Christi and

PORT OF you can feel the paradox that defines many port cities: the waterfront is everywhere, yet the maritime business that

CORPUS CHRISTI: powers the place is easy to miss — until you look past the horizon of tanks, docks, and ship traffic and realize you’re staring at one of the world’s most consequential energy gateways.

By Greg Trauthwein y volume, the Port of Corpus Christi has become a central export valve for U.S. crude oil and a fast-rising platform for LNG—an industrial eco-

Bsystem that has grown at a pace few ports can match. In 2025, the Port and its customers moved 203.4 million tons through the Corpus Christi Ship Channel, a 1.5% decline from 2024’s 206.5 million tons, as crude volumes softened modestly even while LNG continued to climb.

And in the background—quietly shaping everything

Deep Water, Big Energy, and from vessel size to berth productivity—Corpus Christi completed the kind of infrastructure program that changes a port’s trajectory for decades: the Corpus Christi Ship

Channel Improvement Project, deepening the channel from 47 feet to 54 feet (MLLW) and widening it from 400 a Playbook for the Next Era feet to 530 feet, with additional barge shelves built in for safety and operational fuidity.

For Kent Britton, CEO of the Port of Corpus Christi, the growth is real—but so is the responsibility that comes with being a key node in the energy supply chain.

of U.S. Exports “People sometimes don’t understand maritime even in port cities,” Britton told me. “So I try to do the same thing in one little speech after another.”

MARCH/APRIL 2026 OFFSHORE ENGINEER 43