And Why Won't the Palestinians Cooperate?

Israel leads way in making saltwater potable

Scarce rainfall and abundant seawater prompted Israel to find desalination solutions now getting a ‘green’ makeover and being shared globally. So, instead of "bleating" about "unfair" allocation on inflated population figures, why not cooperate with Israel and a) build a desalination plant and b) start recycling water instead of destroying the infrastructure.

In an old Middle Eastern curse, enemies are told to drink from the sea. Cursed with water-shortage problems, Israel has pioneered desalination solutions that are changing the world. From manufacturing China’s largest desalination plant and smaller ones on Caribbean islands, to watering its own agricultural industry, Israel’s desalination business is a story that started at the founding of the state.

Today Israel’s award-winning desalination companies are quenching the thirst of dry nations, and are challenged by today’s environmental questions to provide greener options for tomorrow.

Desalination is a process that removes salts and minerals from otherwise undrinkable sea or saline water. With about 70 percent of the world covered in water, and more than 90% of it saltwater, even the water-rich United States finds itself in need of desalination solutions in California. And Israel is there to help.
The biblical Book of Exodus relates how the ancient Israelite leader Moses was empowered to turn bitter water sweet for drinking. Wind the tape forward to the 1950s, when Israel’s technological progress in desalination was catalyzed by founding father David Ben-Gurion, who saw desalination as part of Israel’s destiny.
Over the last few thousand years, nothing has changed: To survive and thrive, Israelis still need a source for fresh drinking water.

Israel’s major foray into desalination began with IDE Technologies – known as Israel Desalination Engineering when it was government-owned – which has built more than 400 desalination plants in some 40 countries, from Caribbean islands to the United States, to mammoth plants in China and Israel. The company is headquartered in Kadima.

Every day, IDE plants produce about two million cubic meters of potable water for the world to use, and its R&D staff is investigating and implementing greener solutions for an industry not known for its environmentalism. Desalination alleviates world “water pressure”

Some estimates suggest that the demand for water-treatment products will rise 6.2 percent every year to $65 billion in the year 2015. Meeting the world’s water needs requires local and international policy and legislation. Israel is deeply involved in implementing policy locally and sharing its processes with the world.

Looking locally, Israel’s major sources of water are the Sea of Galilee, its holding tank and a number of inland and seaside aquifers. Those sources, now combined with desalinated water, supply a population that has expanded many times over from its former size in the last 80 years. As environmentalists rally to protect coastlines from development, the country is also seeking to establish the creation of artificial islands on which to build desalination plants.

Booky Oren, a former CEO of Israel’s national water carrier Mekorot, is now an independent water consultant and is chairman of Israel’s WATEC conference and expo, held in Tel Aviv from November 15-17, 2011. Oren says rising needs lead to little choice but to desalinate water, and similar situations are felt in the rest of the world as well.

“All the population here is increasing and the demand for water is increasing. This is the force that caused Israel to reinvent itself,” he says. “In the beginning, 50 years ago, Israel began to deliver water from the north to the south from the national carrier. Then we moved to recycled water. We began to recycle the wastewater to create more water because we don’t have enough. All the time there is a crisis because we are coping with continuous droughts. The water you have from natural collection is not enough,” says Oren.

“While tools like drip irrigation help to alleviate the problem, at the end of the day this doesn’t solve Israel’s crisis. Israel took a strategic decision to produce more water from the sea,” he continues, though this is expensive. “By 2015, Israel will be fully independent from rainfall and will produce enough water from the sea. Even coping with continuous droughts, we will have enough.”

Israel had to formulate policy to assure that the price of desalinated water would remain relatively low, and this is where ingenuity had to factor in. Water in Israel was about $2 per cubic meter 20 years ago, and it now it is down to 50 cents– a 75 percent reduction, says Oren. To achieve this cost benefit, Israel invented better ways to recycle water, and processes that were less energy intensive.

Maximising the Use of Waste Water

We are now in the middle of November and are still waiting for the first serious rains of the winter. The Sea of Galillee is fast approaching its black line, the line at which serious damage to the eco system will occur.

Desalination plants are coming on stream one by one, but the need to recycle waste water is paramount.

Out of a total of 500 million cubic meters (MCM) of sewage produced in Israel in 2008, about 70% of the effluents were reclaimed, a figure not many countries can claim to reach.

Local authorities are responsible for the treatment of municipal sewage. In recent years new or upgraded intensive treatment plants were set up in municipalities throughout the country. The ultimate objective is to treat 100% of Israel's wastewater to a level enabling unrestricted irrigation in accordance with soil sensitivity and without risk to soil and water sources.

Some Facts and Figures

500 MCM of wastewater were produced in Israel in 2008

31% MCM of the effluents underwent tertiary treatment (155 MCM)

55% of the wastewater underwent secondary treatment (275 MCM)

92% of the wastewater was adequately treated (460 MCM)

8% of the wastewater remained untreated.

We still need to pray for rain and after the current hot spell with temperatures in the 90's is due to end tomorrow, we have been told by the forecasters to expect rain. Let's hope they are right.

Quenching your Thirst with the Sea

A report from Israel 21C http://www.israel21c.org/ tells of an Israeli company not more than 30 minutes from where I live, making seawater potable for millions of people worldwide, with 400 desalination plants in 40 countries, producing 2,000,000 cubic meters of water a day.


A worker at IDE's desalination plant in Ashdod, which has been operating since 2005 (Photo: - courtesy Israel 21c)

Champagne glasses containing the finest fresh water were raised in a toast last month to celebrate the opening of Israel's third desalination plant, this one in the northern city of Hadera. Lauded as the largest reverse osmosis desalination facility in the world, the plant that takes water from the Mediterranean Sea and makes it safe to drink is expected to produce 127 million cubic meters of water each year - enough to meet the water needs of one in every six Israelis.

Created with an investment of nearly half a billion dollars, the plant was built by IDE Technologies, an Israeli company that has already built two seawater desalination plants on the country's Mediterranean Sea coastline.

It was the government that put in place the plan to create the desalination plant, to meet the demands of a growing population and an imperiled water supply, dependent almost entirely on winter rainfall.

In a 25-year agreement with the government and with its full blessing, the water will be produced at just over 50 cents per cubic meter. IDE's first desalination plant, built on the coast in Ashkelon, has been performing well since 2005, according to company reports. There is a third plant at Palmahim, just south of Tel Aviv, and two more are planned along the coast, in Ashdod and Soreq.

A new era of cheap water?

"The success of the mega-desalination plant concept has ushered in a whole new era of plentiful, affordable water for a world facing severe water challenges," says IDE Technologies CEO, in a press statement. "With the launch of the Ashkelon plant in 2005, we pledged to continue pursuing further breakthroughs in plant capacity and water cost."

IDE boasts technological breakthroughs in the fields of thermal and membrane desalination, and also, perhaps surprisingly for a country in the Middle East, in snowmaking. In desalination, the salt is removed from seawater using a process called Reverse Osmosis (RO) one of two ways to use desalination membranes to process water. In RO, water from a highly pressurized salty solution is channeled through a water-permeable membrane to separate it from its salty component. The second approach is via a process called electrodialysis.

The new desalination plant at Hadera is the largest in the world, and is expected to produce enough water for one in six Israelis.

Shmulik Shai, general manager of H2ID, the Hadera desalination plant, told ISRAEL21c that for the past five years Israel has been facing a severe shortage in its three main sources of water: The Sea of Galilee, its mountain aquifer and its coastal aquifers. Below the red line in terms of volume and nitrates, if the country doesn't find a solution now, these sources could be damaged indefinitely, he warns.

"The balance of rainwater is not good enough," says Shai. If there's one short season of rain and a spike in population, Israel's semi-arid climate could find itself with a "chronic shortage problem," he continues. And while 70 percent of the country's water is supplied by rain that falls in the winter months, there are periods of drought in Israel when the rain does not come down at all. To make things worse, rainfall is not evenly distributed, he remarks.

The new plant will furnish a good portion of the 750 million cubic meters of water that Israelis require for personal use, he tells ISRAEL21c. And among the desalination technologies that the Hadera plant utilizes are those developed by IDE, including new processes and new mechanisms, such as how to pressurize the water. To date, IDE has constructed some 400 desalination plants in 40 countries, with a total water output of 2,000,000 cubic meters per day.