ENCINAL, Texas / WASHINGTON — Yesterday’s Oval unveil was the headline. This morning’s fact sheet is the blueprint. As President Trump barnstorms Texas manufacturing on October 1, Commerce and Korean reporting lock in the Texas chapter of South Korea’s roughly $200 billion strategic energy package: Project Star — a $22.3 billion natural-gas power campus in Encinal, La Salle County, built to feed American AI and the Texas grid.
This is not a rewrite of the Sep 30 Korea $200B piece. It is the additive follow Patriots needed: names, megawatts, partners, and dates. Commerce’s fact sheet and the Related/NextEra/Lewis release describe Project Star as a combined-cycle gas generation complex of about 6.47 gigawatts supporting an adjacent privately funded ~5 gigawatt Related Digital data-center campus — with excess electricity returned to ERCOT, consistent with Gov. Greg Abbott’s rule that data centers bring their own generation.
The partnership is America First industrial muscle. Related Companies and NextEra Energy Resources plan to develop, build, and operate the gas fleet; Lewis Energy Group brings South Texas land, gas, and infrastructure roots. Partners project roughly 8,400 jobs at peak construction, about 170 permanent jobs at the power campus, and hundreds more permanent roles at the adjacent data centers — with commercial operation eyed as early as 2029 and full capacity around 2032.
Trump’s Oval framing still sets the scoreboard. He cast the Texas plant as among the largest ever built, paired with eight large-scale nuclear plants and the Alaska LNG pipeline under the broader Korea deal (~$350B total framework: $150B shipbuilding + $200B strategic). Commerce labels the nuclear track Project Power — eight units mixing two Korean APR1400 reactors and six U.S. AP1000s inside a roughly $120 billion funding frame — and the Alaska LNG track Project North, advancing under the Strategic Investment MOU’s commercial-reasonableness test, with Lutnick citing more than $50 billion aimed at Alaska.
Yonhap’s October 1 coverage underscores why the follow matters: Trump announced the package beside Lutnick, Burgum, Wright, and Sen. Dan Sullivan, calling it a major step toward American energy dominance and a stronger Pacific partnership. Korean officials and Commerce paperwork now give Encinal a street address on that map — Texas gas powering American AI, not another paper promise.
Race to the Mid-terms energy politics is kitchen-table simple. Democrats throttled production and lectured about scarcity. Trump puts Korean capital, Texas Permian molecules, and AI wattage on the same America First ledger — then visits a Denton truck plant the next day. Watch the Official White House Commerce announcement video. Project Star is how the Golden Age keeps the lights on for the factories and the data centers that win the century.
