Nueces County
The country’s biggest crude gateway, and it was rebuilt last year
This is the largest United States gateway for crude oil exports, handling more than half of all of them. The ship channel moved 203.4 million tons in 2025, of which crude was 127.4 million.
Both figures came down slightly rather than up: total tonnage fell 1.5% from the year before, and crude fell 2.3%. Worth saying plainly, because a port page that only ever reports growth is not reporting.
The infrastructure changed underneath that traffic. The channel improvement project took the main channel from 47 feet deep to 54 and from 400 feet wide to 530, finishing in 2025. The replacement Harbor Bridge opened on the 28th of June that year with 205 feet of navigation clearance, against 138 feet on the structure it replaced.
So the road side of it is tank work, and a lot of waiting
Those 203.4 million tons do not arrive by pipeline alone, and what moves by road here is overwhelmingly liquid.
It is terminal work rather than long-haul: short runs between tank farms, docks and plants, with a gate queue at each end. That puts hours on an engine at a rate the odometer never shows, which is the single most misleading thing about a Nueces County truck’s mileage.
None of it stops us buying. It does mean we would rather hear the hours than the miles, and know what the tank last carried. A channel 54 feet deep and 530 feet wide keeps that queue full.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
All of that terminal traffic runs under one statutory ceiling, whatever is in the tank.
Texas sets gross weight at 80,000 lb, a single axle at 20,000 lb and a tandem at 34,000 lb — the plain federal figures, with no commodity variance of the kind Georgia and Kentucky grant.
What Texas grants instead is permits, and each one is written for a named industry: ready-mixed concrete, fluid milk, timber, and super heavy single-trip. There is no permit named for aggregate, stone, sand or quarry products. So a stone hauler here gets the general permit and nothing else, while a ready-mix truck sits on the list — two trades a reader might treat as one, on opposite sides of the line.
The general permit adds ten per cent on the axle and five per cent on gross, and it comes with a bond and liability for actual damage to load-restricted roads. On a load-zoned road the permitted weight is ten per cent less than the maximum, so those two percentages run in opposite directions and must never be added together.
Tex. Transp. Code § 621.101; Chapter 623 permits. Information, not legal advice.
Texas paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork comes down to one sentence.
Everything after that sentence is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Both are ordinary and neither stops a sale.
One Texas rule is worth knowing because it runs further than any other state on file. Texas brands a truck salvage only where the cost of repairs exceeds the actual cash value before the damage — effectively one hundred per cent, against eighty in Florida and sixty in Oklahoma. And it is a two-part test, not pure arithmetic: there must also be damage to, or a missing, major component part.
The statute lists thirteen major component parts, and the calculation leaves out repainting and sales tax, which no other state on file excludes. For a truck whose damage is mostly cosmetic that moves the answer a long way.
Tex. Transp. Code § 501.091. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule file was last verified.
What we buy here
All of that iron is iron we buy. Tankers off the crude and product work, both liquid and pneumatic. Vacuum trucks and service bodies off the maintenance side. Day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Most of it works between the docks and the plants, under 205 feet of bridge clearance where the old structure gave 138 feet.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.
We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Small things — a missing bumper — are fine.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in Corpus Christi
- Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Rust is not a disqualifier.
- It hauled crude or product.Ordinary here. Tell us what it carried and whether the tank has been cleaned, and we will take it from there.
- The hours are high and the miles are low.Normal on a channel 54 feet deep and 530 feet wide, with a gate queue at both ends. Not a problem — tell us the hours.
- What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route.
- Do you have to come out to look at it?Not necessarily. We can come to you and drive it away, come and tow it, buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you can drive it to us. Whichever suits the truck and your week.
Why people call
Beyond a terminal contract ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A back that has had enough of the queue on the channel road.
Yards across Nueces County and out toward San Patricio usually have one waiting, and 203.4 million tons a year keeps a lot of equipment busy.
Most of those aren’t happy reasons, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.