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Articles by Senior Staff Writer Tik Root

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Diane Wilson had heard rumors for months that Exxon might be coming to Point Comfort, Texas, which sits on the Gulf Coast south of Galveston. She recalls whispers about the global behemoth hiring local electricians and negotiating railroad access. Two days before Christmas, the first confirmation quietly arrived: an application for tax subsidies to build an $8.6 billion plastics manufacturing plant.

Wilson found the news particularly alarming. She has spent years fighting to clean up pollution from another petrochemical plant and won a $50 million settlement against its owners, Formosa, in 2019. Exxon would build its proposed facility across from that factory and discharge waste into the same waterways Wilson has spent decades fighting to protect.

“We have been cleaning the piss out of [Cox Creek], and this is the very place where Exxon is going to try to put its plastics plant,” Wilson, who lives in nearby Seadrift, said of the facility’s potential location. “You see this nightmare of another plant, trying to do the very same thing.”

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