Home Care In Conroe, TX

A Texas company is betting $100 million that it can help break China's grip on a critical material used in electric vehicles, wind turbines and defense equipment—starting with a new plant near Houston.

Hertha Metals broke ground Thursday on Chalyx, a $100 million plant in Conroe, designed to produce about 10,000 metric tons of steel-grade and magnet-grade high-purity iron per year, according to a recent news release. Built beside Hertha's Pi100 pilot plant, the complex is expected to become the first modern iron and steel innovation complex in the U.S.

Chalyx, located on FM 3082 in Conroe, is expected to begin operating in late 2027 and produce high-purity iron for magnets in early 2028. The plant will run on domestic iron ore, primarily from Minnesota's Iron Range, and Texas natural gas.

The plant will make high-purity iron for U.S. companies that produce rare-earth magnets, which are used in electric cars, wind turbines, data centers, robots and defense equipment. Hertha says China currently produces about 94 percent of the high-purity iron used in them.

The company is working to qualify as a supplier to major U.S. magnet makers.

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"Over the last two years, our team has worked relentlessly to prove the promise of our technology through production," Laureen Meroueh, CEO and founder of Hertha, said in the release. "With Chalyx, we take the next step: proving the business and demonstrating that our technology can deliver commercially."

Meroueh said successful operations at Chalyx could lay the foundation for a future 500,000-metric-ton-per-year steel mill.

"For me, that is what makes today so meaningful: seeing persistence become the foundation for a new generation of iron and steelmaking," Meroueh said.

Hertha says it developed the world's first process for making iron or steel from ore in one step, using a single furnace. By adjusting the process, the furnace can produce either liquid steel or very pure iron. The company said its process can use low-quality iron unlike most traditional plants, decreasing costs by 25 percent and producing 50 percent fewer emissions when using natural gas or 98 percent when using hydrogen.

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Hertha named CV Engineering as an engineering, procurement and construction management partner for Chalyx.

"It's rare to build a new primary ironmaking plant around a process that's already running at pilot scale next door," Kalyan Sennerikuppam, president and CEO of CV Engineering, said in the release. "Our job is to take what Hertha has proven and build it to the standard the steel industry expects of any mill."

The groundbreaking follows Hertha's $133.65 million Series A funding round, which included a $65 million U.S. government investment through the Department of War's IBAS program.

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Oct 13, 2026

CONROE, Texas - City leaders in Conroe are exploring whether the growing municipality north of Houston could realistically compete to host the newly proposed U.S. Space Academy.

Could Conroe realistically host the U.S. Space Academy?

The backstory:

During council member inquiry time at the Sept. 10 meeting, council members David Hairel and Shana Arthur asked city staff to evaluate if Conroe has the infrastructure and positioning required to attract the federal institution.

The proposal follows an executive order signed Aug. 28 by President Donald Trump at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, establishing a presidential commission to develop plans for the academy. The NASA-led federal academy will focus on technical education, leadership development and public service.

The commission has 120 days to submit recommendations covering curriculum, governance and a permanent campus location.

Deison Technology Park as a primary potential site

Local perspective:

Local leaders pointed to Deison Technology Park as a primary potential site. The city-owned business park opened in 2013 on 214 available acres, with an additional 400 contiguous acres in the nearby Conroe Industrial Park.

"We have the land," Hairel said. "Deison Technology Park, it is shovel-ready. There are approximately 214 acres available right now... We have room for their initial plans, and we have for expansion as much as they would want."

Hairel noted that bringing the campus to Conroe would mark a pivotal shift for the city.

"The Space Academy is going to be... a generational transformational project for Conroe," Hairel said. "Conroe would never be the same. Montgomery County would never be the same... It would change Conroe forever."

In a statement provided to FOX 26, Arthur highlighted Conroe's unique industrial overlap, pointing to the city's established engineering base in subsea, deepwater, energy and petrochemical technology.

"Those industries have spent decades developing engineering, equipment and technology for extreme environments, and I believe that connection to the challenges of space is one of Conroe’s most distinctive advantages," Arthur said. She added that the area offers an inland buffer from coastal storms, quality-of-life amenities like Lake Conroe, and a community with a strong tradition of public service.

Hairel acknowledged that the biggest question facing local officials is convincing state decision-makers why the federal campus should land in Conroe.

"I think our biggest risk is that, why would it be in Conroe?" Hairel said. "A lot of people would have that question... What we're really asking for is we want an opportunity to be before that committee to present why Conroe is an excellent, viable opportunity."

To meet NASA's interim requirement of hosting 300 students by 2028, Hairel pointed to local housing capacity as a key selling point.

"Conroe has 38,000 units of multifamily housing," Hairel said. "We have an occupancy rate in those right now of 91%. That leaves nearly 10% of 38,000. That's 3,800 apartments that are multifamily, that are empty. If the initial class is 300, we certainly can meet that."

The selection process is moving rapidly

What's next:

The selection process is moving rapidly. On Sept. 10, NASA announced it is seeking state-level information, with each state permitted to submit one response through its governor or a governor's designee by Oct. 26.

Gov. Greg Abbott recently appointed a specialized state leadership team, led by state Rep. Greg Bonnen, to collaborate with the Texas Space Commission and formulate the state's official submission.

NASA's preliminary schedule calls for breaking ground no later than 2027, temporarily accommodating its first class in 2028, and opening a permanent campus by 2031.

City Administrator David Willard agreed to gather more information on the opportunity. City officials are currently evaluating whether to hire specialized site-selection consulting firms to assist with a formal feasibility assessment before the state's October deadline.

Conroe, Texas, has experienced extraordinary population growth, surging from roughly 39,000 to more than 115,000 residents in just 20 years. It’s now among the fastest-growing cities in the U.S., ranked No. 1 in the burgeoning Houston metro area. This explosive growth strained Conroe’s water system, triggering a development moratorium and creating an urgent need to modernize aging water infrastructure while dramatically expanding capacity.

Schneider Electric partnered with the City of Conroe to deploy EcoStruxure Automation Expert (EAE), an open, software-defined automation platform, across all 19 of the city’s water and wastewater facilities as part of a $50-million infrastructure upgrade, the most ambitious in the city’s history. The project transformed a fragmented, manually operated water system into a unified, digitally managed network capable of serving Conroe’s rapidly growing population with 24/7 reliability. It’s a model for other cities, and worthy of recognition by POWER in the Water category of our annual Top Plant awards.

Before the modernization, Conroe’s water operations depended on customer complaints to flag service issues, and operators spent about five hours each day manually collecting data across facilities. With the system adding roughly 2,000 new water accounts per year, and summer irrigation accounting for more than 50% of the city’s total water use, Conroe’s legacy infrastructure could not keep pace. The vulnerability of the system was further underscored by the devastation of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which highlighted the critical need for built-in disaster recovery and remote operational capabilities.

Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Automation Expert represents a fundamentally different approach to water utility automation. Unlike proprietary, hardware-locked systems, EAE decouples software from hardware, enabling the city to deploy standardized, modular automation across all 19 of its facilities. The system was scaled from just four original plants to today’s 19 without the exponential engineering costs traditionally associated with such expansion. The platform, deployed alongside Modicon M262 Logic & Motion Controllers and Variable Speed Drives, enables secure remote monitoring, automated data collection, real-time alerting, and built-in cybersecurity with disaster recovery—transforming operations from reactive to proactive.

A key infrastructure component enabled by this modernization is the Silver Springs Bypass waterline project, a 1,550-foot, 16-inch pipeline from Water Plant 15 that delivers 1,200 gallons per minute to areas west of Interstate 45 and northeast Conroe, significantly strengthening the city’s distribution network. The automation platform also supports upcoming expansions including Water Plant No. 29 (1,500-gpm well with 1-million-gallon storage) and multiple new wells planned through 2026, ensuring the system can scale with continued growth.

The deployment has delivered quantifiable improvements across every dimension of Conroe’s water operations:

What makes the Conroe project especially noteworthy is its replicability. Thousands of small and mid-sized municipalities across the U.S. face the same convergence of aging infrastructure, population growth, and climate vulnerability. Conroe’s deployment demonstrates that open, software-defined automation is not limited to large metropolitan utilities—it can be adopted by growing cities of any size to achieve transformational improvements in water stewardship. The open architecture avoids vendor lock-in, allowing municipalities to integrate best-of-breed hardware and scale incrementally as budgets and demand require.

The initiative also advances Conroe’s broader goals around transparency and quality of life. Enhanced monitoring and system visibility allow the city to track performance in real time, identify and address issues before they affect residents, and maintain consistent, reliable water service delivery across a rapidly expanding community. Through this collaboration, Schneider Electric and the City of Conroe have created a blueprint for how municipalities can leverage innovative automation to modernize critical water infrastructure, reduce water loss, improve operational resilience, and build future-ready water systems capable of serving generations to come.

—POWER

Conroe City Council approved new regulations Aug. 13 governing how data centers could be developed and operated in the city, as officials said there is already interest in bringing the industry to Conroe.

The details

The ordinance adds regulations covering permitting, construction, operation, decommissioning and public transparency for data center facilities.

Newly appointed Community Development Director Brandy Taylor said the goal was to put protections in place before a project moves forward.

“The reason for bringing this forward is to really have a mechanism in place so we can protect our infrastructure and our taxpayers,” Taylor said.

Taylor later told council there is already “some interest here in Conroe,” but she did not identify a company or proposed site during the discussion.

Without the ordinance, Taylor said the city did not have the same mechanisms in place to ensure infrastructure costs tied to a data center would fall on the developer rather than the city.

What you need to know

Under the ordinance, Conroe is open to data center development that is compatible with the community and existing infrastructure. A developer must demonstrate adequate water, sewer, street, drainage, signal and electrical capacity, while costs for infrastructure needed to serve the development must be funded by the owner.

The ordinance defines a data center as a facility with an aggregate designed critical information technology electrical load or capacity of at least 75 megawatts.

Taylor said applicants will also have to submit 37 required items before the permitting process can begin, including water capacity information, an Electric Reliability Council of Texas grid study, noise and vibration assessments, emergency response planning, traffic analysis and a decommissioning plan.

“We would not move forward until it’s a complete packet,” Taylor said.

The regulations require water capacity for permit approval and call for closed-loop cooling or similar technology designed to avoid continuously drawing water from the public supply. Data centers must also have on-site emergency power generation capable of maintaining critical systems for at least 72 hours during utility interruptions. Operational noise cannot exceed 5 decibels above ambient sound levels at the property line, with corrective measures triggered when noise reaches 3.5 decibels above ambient levels.

The ordinance also establishes a 300-foot minimum separation between a data center property and properties containing residences, commercial uses, child care facilities, schools, hospitals, parks and other listed uses.

A closer look

A data center cannot receive a permit without City Council approval, and the process includes public notice and a public hearing.

Before an application is filed, the operator must mail notice to property owners within 2,000 feet of the proposed site and notify registered neighborhood associations within 3,000 feet.

Additional notice is required ahead of the public hearing, including notice to specified property owners and uses within 3,000 feet.

Taylor said the city would also require a sign at the site and newspaper notice and supported using social media to further alert residents.

“That way the citizens can come to the public hearing, voice their opinions, ask questions,” Taylor said.

If additional technical expertise is needed, Taylor said the ordinance allows the city to bring in outside help at the developer’s expense.

“If at some point the city felt like we needed an outside consultant ... they bear the cost of that as well,” Taylor said.

What residents are saying

Several residents urged council to go further with the regulations.

Montgomery County resident Moniqua' Scott questioned whether the 300-foot separation requirement was enough to protect nearby residents and children.

“Why was the 300 feet selected?” Scott said. “What evidence says that is enough distance to protect residents and children?”

Scott also raised concerns about water, wastewater and electrical infrastructure, telling council she believes disclosure is not protection and asking the city to ensure residents do not absorb costs created by a private data center.

Conroe resident Josh Graff similarly called the ordinance “a great start,” but said it did “not go far enough.” Among his requests were stronger provisions related to light and noise pollution, water conservation, emissions and ensuring infrastructure and utility costs are not shifted to taxpayers.

Council member David Hairel also raised several items he wanted the city to continue examining, including beneficial ownership disclosures, generator emissions, cumulative impacts if multiple data centers locate in the area and protections for decommissioning a facility.

What’s next?

Mayor Duke Coon described the ordinance as a starting point that could be strengthened over time.

“At this moment, the city has no protection,” Coon said before the vote, adding that the city needed to begin the process and “work to refine this along the way.”

Council members specifically asked whether they could come back and tighten the ordinance as soon as a future meeting.

“Absolutely, we can revise it at any time,” Taylor said. “But without moving forward today, we do not have the protection that we need.”

Coon said staff could bring amendments back as needed before council approved the ordinance.

If a data center application is ultimately filed, the city estimates the process would take about 120-150 days after all requirements are obtained and applicable fees are paid. Incomplete applications or required corrections could extend that timeline.

The process includes technical review and a City Council public hearing before council can approve, approve with conditions, deny or request modifications to an application.