September 25, 2026 Weekly Intel

Texas Freezes State Data Center Permits as Fluidstack Starts a 4 Billion Dollar 1.5 Gigawatt Campus in Cameron County, FERC Extends Magnolia LNG to 2029 as Venture Global Orders Eight Liquefaction Modules for Plaquemines, Washington Weighs a 90 Day Diesel Export Ban with Refiners Running at 94 Percent, Corpus Christi Clears the Final Permit for a 100 Million Gallon per Day Desalination Plant, and AGC Finds 73 Percent of Contractors Still Plan to Hire

This week the industrial expansion cycle ran straight into the questions that decide who actually delivers: power, water, fuel, permits, and people. On September 21 Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to stop issuing state permits for data centers until an ERCOT audit is complete, with more than 470 gigawatts of data centers and other large loads waiting to connect to the Texas grid. At the same time Fluidstack pushed ahead on a 4 billion dollar first phase of an AI campus planned for up to 1.5 gigawatts in Cameron County, with more than 2,500 construction jobs. FERC granted Glenfarne's 8.8 million ton per year Magnolia LNG project a five year extension to November 2029, Black Bayou Energy Hub committed 1.6 billion dollars to a Cameron Parish gas storage hub that breaks ground in the fourth quarter, and Baker Hughes booked Venture Global orders for 13 compression systems and eight modular liquefaction units for the Plaquemines expansion. Washington debated a 90 day diesel export ban with diesel at 6.52 dollars per gallon and American refiners running near 94 percent of capacity. The Port of Corpus Christi secured the final state permit for its 100 million gallon per day Harbor Island desalination plant, and ExxonMobil began capturing CO2 from Nucor's Convent Louisiana ironmaking plant. And AGC data showed construction spending down 3.8 percent year over year while data center spending rose 57.2 percent, with 73 percent of contractors still planning to hire. This is the operating environment PSV Industries is built for.

Texas Freezes State Data Center Permits While Fluidstack Starts a 1.5 Gigawatt Campus in the Rio Grande Valley

On September 21 Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to halt new permits for data centers until regulators complete an audit of the energy intensive facilities seeking to connect to the Texas grid, according to Reuters. The directive effectively freezes state issued permits for data center developers. It follows Abbott's freeze last month on connecting new data centers to the grid, and ERCOT is still in the early stages of auditing data center power use, tax incentives, and water consumption. The scale behind the decision is extraordinary: more than 470 gigawatts of data centers and other large energy users are in line to connect, more than five times the state's peak demand.

The same week showed where serious projects are still moving. Fluidstack has started construction on a 4 billion dollar first phase of an AI data center campus on more than 1,100 acres near Rio Hondo in Cameron County, east of Valley International Airport and west of the Port of Harlingen, with plans to support up to 1.5 gigawatts of capacity and a first phase completion target of mid 2028, as reported by TheEnergyMag. The county worksite permit issued September 10 covers land clearing, grading, utility installation, and drainage, with separate permits required before building construction. Fluidstack says it is developing on site generation to reduce demand on ERCOT, is using closed loop cooling, and has sought no local tax abatement. KRGV reports the project will create more than 2,500 construction jobs and several hundred permanent positions, with local hiring first for construction, electrical, and skilled trades.

What this means for fabrication and construction: Texas is not slowing the data center cycle. It is sorting it. The projects that keep moving are the ones that bring their own power, their own water discipline, and a credible execution plan. That shifts scope toward the industrial side of the fence: on site gas generation, switchgear and electrical buildings, closed loop cooling plants, pipe rack, structural steel, and utility packages that look far more like a process plant than an office build. A 1.5 gigawatt campus in the Rio Grande Valley sits inside the same South Texas labor market as Rio Grande LNG in Brownsville, which means craft availability, not capital, becomes the schedule constraint. Owners who lock in a fabricator and constructor that already owns its craft workforce and can shop build modules and skids ahead of the permit sequence will be the ones who hit energization dates when the audit clears.

FERC Extends Magnolia LNG to November 2029 as Louisiana Gas Infrastructure Keeps Building

FERC has granted Glenfarne Group's Magnolia LNG a five year extension to complete construction and place its planned 8.8 million ton per year export plant in Louisiana into service, pushing the in service deadline to November 2029, even as the project still lacks a final investment decision, according to LNG Journal. The extension keeps a fully permitted Lake Charles area site alive in a market where new long term contracting remains strong and banks are pricing American export risk more cheaply than at almost any point in the sector's history.

Midstream and storage are building out behind the terminals. Louisiana Economic Development announced that Black Bayou Energy Hub, with Mercuria as majority equity sponsor, will invest 1.6 billion dollars in natural gas blending, balancing, storage, and transportation infrastructure centered on the Black Bayou salt dome in West Hackberry, Cameron Parish, extending into Calcasieu Parish. Construction is expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2026, with commercial operations in late 2028 and more than 1,000 construction jobs at peak. The customers named are exactly the load that is converging on Southwest Louisiana: LNG exporters, power generators, utilities, and pipeline operators.

What this means for fabrication and construction: A FERC extension is how a developer holds its place in line, and Southwest Louisiana now has a deep line. Magnolia joins a Cameron and Calcasieu corridor that already holds Commonwealth LNG, Woodside Louisiana LNG, CP2, Sabine Pass Stage 5, and Delfin FLNG, and Black Bayou puts 1,000 more peak construction workers into the same parishes starting this quarter. Gas storage hubs are compressor stations, meter and regulation skids, dehydration and treating packages, piping, and structural steel, all of which can be shop fabricated and set on site. For owners, the lesson is simple: the parish labor pool is finite, and every project that shifts fabrication hours from the field into a controlled shop protects its own schedule.

Venture Global Orders Eight Modular Liquefaction Units and 13 Compression Systems for Plaquemines

Baker Hughes has received two orders from Venture Global, one for 13 gas compression systems driven by Frame 5/2E gas turbines for the Cloud Connector Pipeline that will carry feed gas to Plaquemines LNG, and one for liquefaction equipment for the Plaquemines expansion comprising four liquefaction blocks and eight liquefaction modules, reported Offshore Engineer. Each block will use two electric motor driven, single mixed refrigerant liquefaction modules with Chart cold boxes, centrifugal compression trains, air coolers, and integrated controls. The compression order brings the Frame 5/2E fleet supporting Plaquemines feed gas to 23 systems, and the liquefaction scope follows a similar order for CP2. Baker Hughes described the modular liquefaction solution as supporting the next phase of Venture Global's expansion.

What this means for fabrication and construction: This is the modular construction trend at its most industrial. Venture Global has built its LNG platform on factory built, repeatable liquefaction blocks, and every block still needs the steel, piping, electrical, and field work that connects it to the plant: pipe rack modules, interconnecting piping, foundations and structural steel, electrical and instrument installation, and mechanical completion. Thirteen turbine driven compression packages on a feed gas pipeline mean compressor station buildings, skids, and tie in work across the route. Modular equipment compresses schedule only when the balance of plant around it is fabricated and installed on the same cadence. That is precisely the gap a vertically integrated fabricator and constructor fills.

Washington Weighs a 90 Day Diesel Export Ban While Refiners Run Near 94 Percent

The Trump administration is preparing a plan to ban U.S. diesel exports for 90 days, reported Politico on September 23, with diesel at 6.52 dollars per gallon according to AAA, up 91 cents in a month and 2.83 dollars in a year. It would be the first restriction on U.S. energy exports since the crude export ban was lifted in 2015. The plan is contested inside the administration. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said an export ban would not work, warning that if refiners could not export diesel, storage would fill and refiners would be forced to cut runs, pushing up gasoline and jet fuel prices, according to Reuters. U.S. refineries ran at about 94 percent of capacity the prior week, and 36 industry and business groups signed a letter opposing a ban.

What this means for fabrication and construction: Refiners running at 94 percent utilization into the fall turnaround window are refiners that cannot afford unplanned downtime and cannot afford to let a planned outage run long. Whatever Washington decides, Gulf Coast refineries face pressure to maximize runs now and compress turnaround windows later, which puts a premium on outage execution: prefabricated piping spools, replacement exchangers and structural repairs staged before the unit comes down, and a craft crew that shows up mobilized and ready. Policy volatility on exports also strengthens the case for reliability capital, from the 310 million dollar CITGO Lake Charles project to smaller debottlenecks that let plants flex product slates. PSV's shutdown and turnaround scope is built for exactly this environment.

Corpus Christi Clears the Final Permit for Harbor Island Desalination as Gulf Coast CCS Expands

On September 23 the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality approved the Port of Corpus Christi's offshore discharge permit for the Harbor Island Desalination Facility, completing permitting for a plant designed to produce up to 100 million gallons per day of potable water for industrial and municipal use, reported BIC Magazine. The permits now allow construction. The Nueces River Authority is the lessee and IDE Technologies is the private project partner, and the port began permitting almost a decade ago.

In Louisiana, ExxonMobil began capturing, transporting, and storing CO2 from Nucor's direct reduced iron facility in Convent, at up to 800,000 metric tons per year, its third CCS startup for a third party customer, according to AIST. The network also includes the Rose Class VI storage site in Jefferson County Texas, permitted for up to 5 million metric tons of CO2 per year.

What this means for fabrication and construction: Water is the constraint that sits underneath every Coastal Bend industrial plan, from refining and petrochemicals to LNG and data centers. A 100 million gallon per day seawater desalination plant is a major industrial build in its own right: intake and outfall structures, pump stations, pretreatment and membrane trains, chemical feed skids, electrical buildings, and miles of process and transmission piping. CCS is the same story on the emissions side, with capture units, compression, dehydration, and pipeline tie ins at every emitter that joins the network. Both are infrastructure that unlocks the next wave of Gulf Coast industrial investment, and both reward contractors who can fabricate and install complete packages.

Spending Splits, Hiring Holds: The Craft Workforce Still Sets the Ceiling

Construction spending fell 0.5 percent from June to July and 3.8 percent from a year earlier to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 2.158 trillion dollars, according to AGC of America. The split underneath is the story: manufacturing construction fell 21.7 percent year over year, while power including oil and gas related projects rose 6.5 percent and data center construction jumped 57.2 percent. AGC flagged worker shortages, political pushback, and tariffs as the risks to the segments carrying the market.

The AGC and NCCER 2026 workforce survey of 1,830 respondents found that for the first time since the pandemic more firms cut headcount (37 percent) than added it (34 percent), yet 73 percent still expect to add employees in the coming year, about 87 percent report openings for hourly craft workers, and 81 percent of firms seeking electricians find them hard to hire, reported ENR. Some 83 percent reported turnover among new field hires within their first 90 days. ABC's backlog indicator held at 8.5 months in August, according to Associated Builders and Contractors. The September federal jobs report arrives in early October.

What this means for fabrication and construction: The market is not uniformly soft. It is concentrated. Power, energy, and data center work is growing while general building cools, and that concentration piles demand onto the same electricians, welders, pipefitters, ironworkers, and instrument hands. An 83 percent early turnover rate means contractors who hire project by project are constantly relearning the job. A fabricator and constructor that owns its craft workforce, trains it, and keeps it working across shop and field scopes is carrying a structural advantage into the next two years of Gulf Coast execution.

The Bottom Line

This week showed that capital is no longer the scarcest input in American industrial construction. Texas froze state data center permits with more than 470 gigawatts of large loads waiting on the grid, and the projects still moving, like Fluidstack's 1.5 gigawatt Cameron County campus, are bringing their own power and water plans. FERC kept Magnolia LNG alive to 2029, Black Bayou committed 1.6 billion dollars to Cameron Parish gas storage, and Venture Global ordered eight more modular liquefaction units for Plaquemines. Refiners running near 94 percent faced a possible diesel export ban. Corpus Christi cleared its last permit for 100 million gallons per day of new industrial water. And contractors kept hiring into the tightest craft market in the country.

Power, water, fuel, and permits decide which projects get to build. Craft capacity and execution decide which ones finish on time. PSV Industries is built as the vertically integrated JV that executes scope of work across the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast: shop based structural steel fabrication, process modules, modular skid assembly, field installation and construction, shutdowns and turnarounds, and backlog relief, delivered by a craft workforce we own inside a single execution model. When the permits clear and the gas arrives, owners need a partner that is already mobilized. That is PSV.

Ready to move on your industrial project.

PSV Industries executes structural steel fabrication, process modules, modular skids, field installation and construction, shutdowns and turnarounds, and backlog relief across the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast. Vertically integrated. Shop based. Craft workforce owned. Built for gigawatt scale execution.

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