“Israel today has more water than it needs. It’s gone from drought to water surplus in just a few years, impressive anywhere, but especially in the arid Middle East, one of the driest regions in the world.” I was directed to this commentary through the LinkedIn group for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Environmental and Water Resources Engineering. You can watch the PBS News Hour video from April 26: “How Israel Became a leader in water use in the Middle East.”
Israel leads the world in water reuse, treating both graywater and blackwater—the two classes of sewage—instead of letting this wastewater go to waste. The reuse water, with systems adopted over the last 15 years, can go to irrigating crops in lieu of diverting water from the historically low flow of the Jordan River. Even more significant, five desalination operations built in the last 10 years along the Mediterranean coast are providing up to 50% of Israel’s drinking water.
Each of these desalination plants cost around 400 million dollars to construct. They are privately owned but sell the water to the government, which then sells it to the Israeli people. Breakthroughs in membrane filtration technology have been able to reduce the cost of treating seawater by almost half.
The reporting tours one of the desal plants, owned and operated by IDE Technologies, where seawater goes through a series of smaller and smaller screens and filters and eventually through fine membranes to remove salt and other minerals. This final step is accomplished when pressure vessels shoot the water through the membranes at a pressure equivalent to 70 of earth’s atmospheres.
As with anywhere desalination is considered or applied, the concerns are the amount of energy needed to process the water, and the super concentrated salt waste that is dumped back into the ocean, the environmental impact of which needs further study.
And also, as with anywhere, the human need for fresh reliable drinking water becomes a factor in political conversations, contentions, and compromises.
