PELICAN KEY, Texas — Neighbors, surveyors and at least one visibly confused pelican confirmed Thursday that the beachfront mansion of Continental Petroleum Holdings chief executive Grant Hollister III features a surprisingly high seawall, a 34-foot reinforced-concrete barrier that has risen six times since 1982 in what the executive described as “a purely architectural choice.”
“I just like walls,” said Hollister, 71, speaking from the wall’s observation deck, which overlooks the wall. “Some men collect cars. I collect vertical feet. Any suggestion that this has to do with the ocean is, frankly, speculative. The science on the ocean is far from settled.”
County permit records show the wall was first poured in 1982 and raised each time within weeks of a new internal climate briefing at Continental. Hollister called the timing “a coincidence I’ve noticed, but have chosen not to study,” and noted that the briefings were “internal, which means they don’t count.”
The pattern has precedent. A 2023 study in the journal Science found that Exxon’s own scientists had accurately projected global warming in reports dating to the late 1970s and early 1980s, while the company publicly cast doubt on climate science. In 1989, Shell said it would raise the deck of its Troll natural gas platform in the North Sea by a meter or two to allow for rising seas. A Mobil design document for a gas project off Nova Scotia, reported by the Los Angeles Times in 2015, assumed “an estimated rise in water level, due to global warming, of 0.5 meters.”
“Those were platforms,” Hollister said. “This is a home. A home is where you keep your family safe from things that may or may not be happening.”
Visitors describe the wall as tasteful. Its sea-facing side carries a painted gauge marked in years rather than feet, which Hollister called “a family scrapbook.” The landward side holds a gallery of Continental’s print ads from the 1990s questioning whether the climate was changing, all framed and hung above the projected 2050 waterline, “where they will be safe.”
Asked to estimate how much uncertainty he holds about rising seas, Hollister offered a figure, then a higher one, and each time a contractor on the beach measured out more wall.
The Uncertainty-To-Seawall Converter™
Drag the slider to set how uncertain the CEO says the science is. Our engineers will size the wall accordingly.
Wall budget assumes 1,400 linear feet at rates the contractor said “double once a wall passes 10 feet, or once the client asks why.” Continental’s public uncertainty and private wall height have a correlation of 1.0, which the company describes as “also uncertain.”
The neighbors have not built walls. Most live in modest bungalows that now sit on stilts, and several said they received a gift basket from Hollister last spring containing a four-minute shower timer, a reusable straw and a note reading, “We all have to do our part. I’ve done mine. It’s 34 feet.”
“He told me to take shorter showers,” said Dolores Ybarra, 66, a retired schoolteacher whose bungalow floods during the October king tides. “My living room takes a 40-minute shower every fall. Nobody’s sending it a timer.”
The numbers are not mysterious. A 2022 federal report led by NOAA projects 10 to 12 inches of sea level rise along U.S. coasts by 2050, with the western Gulf seeing more because the land there is also sinking, partly from pumping out oil, gas and groundwater. Hollister’s wall is built for a figure engineers on the project said they were “asked never to say out loud, even to the concrete.”
Hollister has been more generous with public walls. He is a vocal supporter of the Coastal Texas Project, the Army Corps of Engineers’ proposed barrier system for the Galveston Bay area, whose price the Corps estimated in 2023 could reach $57 billion with inflation. About 65 percent would be federal money, and the system is designed to protect, among other things, the region’s refineries and petrochemical plants.
“I believe in personal responsibility for your own house,” Hollister said, “and public responsibility for my refineries.”
Shareholders have raised no objection. The wall is funded through a board-approved line item called “Coastal Aesthetics,” which analysts note is small next to the industry’s payouts; Exxon alone returned about $37 billion to shareholders in 2025, including $20 billion in buybacks. “Every dollar we spend on concrete is a dollar of confidence,” Hollister said. “In concrete.”
A timeline the company provided to HuckFinn, intended to show that the wall’s growth was “organic,” mostly showed the opposite.
The Wall Through The Years
Pick a year. Compare the public statement with the concrete.
Public statement
Seawall height
Internal memo
Memos obtained by HuckFinn. Continental says they are “decorative memos” and that the redacted word is “also decorative.”
Hollister also recently purchased a ranch in the Colorado high country, which he described as “purely for the skiing,” and a decommissioned missile silo, which he described as “purely for the acoustics.” He denied the purchases were connected to his views on climate and said he would also like to remind Americans to turn off the tap while brushing their teeth.
Continental’s communications office later clarified that the wall is not a seawall but a “privacy feature,” and that the privacy it protects is from the Gulf of Mexico specifically.
At press time, Hollister had approved raising the wall another four feet, citing “a strong personal feeling about the number 38,” and ordered a second, smaller wall in front of the first, which he said was for the neighbors, “so they have something to look at.”
Reader Comments (3,400)