[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
DAM-L Israel Raises Its Glass to Desalination (fwd)
----- Forwarded message from Right to Water -----
Return-path: <right-to-water@iatp.org>
Received: from mail.iatp.org (iatp-2.InnovSoftD.com [208.141.36.66])
by lox.sandelman.ottawa.on.ca (8.8.7/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA19954
for <dianne@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca>; Mon, 25 Jun 2001 12:35:00 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from [208.141.36.73] by mail.iatp.org
(Netscape Messaging Server 3.62) with SMTP id 1095
for <dianne@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca>;
Mon, 25 Jun 2001 11:15:35 -0500
From: Right to Water <right-to-water@iatp.org>
To: dianne@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca
Subject: Israel Raises Its Glass to Desalination
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 11:25:00 -0500
X-Mailer: Allaire Cold Fusion 3.1
Message-ID: <20010625161529272.AAV973.1095@[208.141.36.73]>
Right to Water (right-to-water@iatp.org) Posted: 06/25/2001 By mritchie@iatp.org
============================================================
New York Times
June 23, 2001
Israel Raises Its Glass to Desalination
By WILLIAM A. ORME Jr.
Israel Hadari for The New York Times
A 36-million-gallon-a-day plant is planned for Ashkelon.
Get Stock Quotes Look Up Symbols
Separate symbols with a space.
Portfolio | Company Research | U.S. Markets
Int. Markets | Mutual Funds | Bank Rates | Commodities & Currencies
Israel Hadari for The New York Times
Shimon Peres, left, the Israeli foreign minister, with David Waxman of IDE
Technologies at a desalination plant that IDE built in Larnaca, Cyprus.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
ERUSALEM, June 22 — In an old Middle Eastern curse, enemies and miscreants
are scornfully told to "drink from the sea." But for decades now, the
wealthy but arid nations of the Persian Gulf have been drinking ocean
water, purifying it with the world's biggest desalination plants.
Now thirsty Israel is also turning to the sea, with the government taking
bids for its first large desalination projects. To be built on the
Mediterranean south of Tel Aviv, the plants promise to alleviate Israel's
chronic water shortage and, officials hope, avert clashes with its Arab
neighbors over the region's dwindling ground water supplies.
Unlike the costly steam- based systems used elsewhere in the Middle East,
the Israeli method uses energy-efficient filtration devices that Israel has
helped to perfect, but long could not afford on a large scale at home.
But continuing technological innovation has now pushed the price for
desalted seawater down to $2 for a thousand gallons, compared with $6 a
decade ago, with experts forecasting further reductions. Urban consumers in
Israel already pay about $4 per thousand gallons.
"It is affordable for Israel anyway you look at it," said David Hasson, a
scientist and co-founder of the Israel Desalination Society, which has
pressed for adoption of the technology here.
Water levels in Israel's reservoirs and aquifers have dropped
precipitously. The Sea of Galilee, the holding tank for most of Israel's
fresh water, is receding to its lowest levels on record, and the government
is exploring the emergency importation of tankerloads of Turkish water to
avert a crisis.
"We need this water urgently," said David Waxman, the chief executive of
IDE Technologies Ltd., a company in Ra'anana, Israel, that is leading one
of three consortiums seeking to build and operate a 36-
million-gallon-a-day desalination plant planned for the port city of
Ashkelon. Within a few months, Israel's water company will invite proposals
for a bigger plant up the coast in Ashdod, with a projected output of 47
million gallons a day.
Industry experts expect more Israeli projects, with desalination facilities
integrated into coastal power plants that will be fueled by newly
discovered offshore natural gas reserves. Extrapolating from current supply
and consumption trends, experts say that a drought a decade from now could
leave Israel facing a shortfall of at least 300 million gallons a day.
"There really is no water," Uri Saguey, the chairman of Mekorot, Israel's
state water company, said Thursday in a public plea for desalination
investment. "Any entrepreneur who gets government approval for desalinating
water should be blessed."
Desalination projects can be completed quickly, says IDE, which has been
building them elsewhere in the world for 30 years. This April, IDE began
operating its latest plant, in Larnaca, Cyprus, just 14 months after
breaking ground. "Israel could use 10 of them," Mr. Waxman said.
The Israeli contracts, expected together to be worth perhaps $250 million,
will be among the most hotly contested anywhere in the increasingly
competitive desalination industry, experts say. Annual revenue from the
water projects is expected to triple, to $100 billion, over the next two
decades, with most of the growth coming from the new filtration systems
that will be showcased in the Israeli plants.
Instead of heating and distilling the brine, which requires abundant
surplus energy, these plants strain salt out of seawater with synthetic
membranes in a process consuming half as much power.
World demand for these improved reverse-osmosis systems — also used for
purifying brackish and polluted water — is now growing at 10 times the pace
of thermal desalination, estimates Eric Jankel of Aqua Resources
International, a consulting company in Evergreen, Colo. Israel, where
universities have long been world leaders in desalination research, is
expected to be a proving ground for further technological advances in the
field, he said.
"The Ashkelon plant will be the largest pure seawater reverse osmosis plant
in the world, " Mr. Jankel said. "That gives it a significance beyond the
Middle East."
Also competing for the Ashkelon contract is Ionics Inc. of Watertown,
Mass., which says it has the most membrane-based desalination plants —
about 3,000 but many of them relatively small — in operation worldwide. The
third approved bidder is a consortium led by Cadagua, part of the Ferrovial
Group of Spain, which has built desalination plants in Tunisia, Cyprus and
Spain.
Elsewhere in the world, more than 30 large seawater desalination plants are
now in the construction or planning stage. With desalination becoming
increasingly efficient and affordable, it is beginning to look like an
ideal growth industry: the raw material is abundant, and demand for the
finished product is almost unquenchable.
The World Meteorological Organization says that by 2025 almost a billion
people will face serious water shortages. And much of this population will
be living on or near a coast, from the South China Sea to Southern
California to here in the southern Mediterranean.
"There is huge competition now in the business, so prices are decreasing,"
said Jean-Marie Brun, a water systems engineer for Vivendi Environnement of
France, the single biggest company in the field. "And the technology, which
is very good now, is getting better all the time."
The largest membrane-based desalination plant now under construction is in
Tampa, Fla., where the Poseidon Resources Corporation and the Covanta
Energy Corporation will be producing 25 million gallons of water a day for
about $1.75 per thousand gallons, the lowest rate in the world. But the
estuarine waters of Tampa Bay are far less salty than the ocean, cutting
filtration costs.
In Trinidad, Ionics is building what will be the biggest ocean-desalination
plant in the Western Hemisphere, with an output of 29 million gallons a day
at about $2.50 per thousand gallons. IDE's plant in Cyprus provides 16
million gallons of drinkable water a day for a similar price. But with
improving technology and economies of scale, contractors for the Israeli
projects are expected to keep the cost close to $2 per thousand gallons.
Cadagua and Ionics both have local Israeli partners. But IDE, with more
than 300 plants operating on five continents, is the only Israeli company
with a proven record abroad. Owned by two private Israeli industrial
conglomerates, Israel Chemicals Ltd. and the Delek Group Ltd., IDE builds
desalination devices for export in Ra'anana, north of Tel Aviv, and argues
that it should be the beneficiary of a little home-team favoritism in the
tender.
"I think the government should support local technology, local know- how
and local R & D," Mr. Waxman said. "They are getting paid back, because we
are all Israelis, paying our taxes here."
But IDE, forewarned that its favorite-son status will not guarantee
success, is bidding in partnership with Vivendi, the current world
heavyweight.
Vivendi, a unit of Vivendi Universal, the media and telecommunications
giant, has been buying its way to global primacy in the water purification
business, paying $6 billion two years ago for USFilter of Palm Desert,
Calif., an innovator in membrane technologies. A year earlier, Vivendi
absorbed the International Desalination Company, a distillation specialist
that is known by its French acronym, Sidem, and is a desalination leader in
the Persian Gulf.
The pioneer and still by far the biggest desalination market in the world
is almost next door to Israel. Kuwait, which built its first plant in 1957,
was the first country anywhere to rely on desalination for drinking water.
By 1990 there were about 15,000 desalination plants in the Gulf states,
more than in the rest of the world combined. Saudi Arabia alone expects to
spend $50 billion on new plants in the next 20 years, the Saline Water
Conversion Corporation there recently said.
Most of the new gulf projects will use heated water from power plants, a
process that is an IDE specialty. But as an Israeli company, IDE is
excluded from bidding in the region. "Our inability to go to the gulf is
our biggest disappointment," Mr. Waxman said.
Almost equally frustrating had been the lack of better business
opportunities at home. The isolated Red Sea port of Eilat gets drinking
water from an IDE plant, and there are smaller experimental operations
scattered across the country. But despite Israel's recognized prowess as an
innovator in the field, economics and politics kept it from embracing
desalination as the solution to its own water problem.
In some circles of the Israeli right, desalination was opposed out of
concern that a new fresh water supply would weaken Israel's strategic case
for control of aquifers beneath the West Bank. On the left, some had argued
that peace with Syria would let Israel buy surplus water from Lebanon. The
last Israeli government proposed a coastal desalination plant, but as part
of a peace pact with the Palestinians; the water was to be shared between
Gaza and Israel, with foreign governments footing the bill.
Peace deals and donor subsidies appear less likely now. But desalination
has an important booster in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who has long
favored it as a tool to get water disputes off the regional diplomatic
agenda. A year and a half ago, as the leader of the Israeli opposition, Mr.
Sharon proposed building two plants on the Mediterranean for the Gaza Strip
and Israel.
"This is one of the first things I am going to do after we establish
quiet," Mr. Sharon vowed in an interview a few days before taking office in
February.
Some experts still challenge the economic rationale for desalination in
Israel. The debate parallels American energy policy arguments, with
advocates of increased production battling analysts who say scarcity is
best eased through conservation.
Israel, like many nations, pumps water to arid farming districts at steeply
subsidized rates. Agricultural users, paying half as much as industrial
customers, account for three-fifths of Israel's water consumption. Yet
agriculture contributes just 2 percent of Israel's gross domestic product.
Most of the water irrigating Israeli fields and orchards has been purified
to drinking-water quality. Finance ministry economists say higher prices
would reduce demand by eliminating some marginal farming operations and
encouraging the recycling of waste water.
But pricing reform remains politically unpalatable, and the supply- siders
are winning the debate.
"There are two factors here," said Mr. Saguey of Israel's water company.
"One is God, who brings whatever rain he does. In the last few years he's
been a little disappointing. The other is whatever water sources we can
develop ourselves."
Mark Ritchie, President
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
2105 First Ave. South
612-870-3400 office 612-870-4846 fax
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55404 U.S.A.
mritchie@iatp.org www.iatp.org
www.wtowatch.org, www.farmbillwatch.org
www.gefoodalert.org, www.sustain.org/biotech
============================================================
How to Use this Mailing List
============================================================
You received this e-mail as a result of your registration on the right-to-water mailing list.
To unsubscribe, please send an email to listserv@iatp.org. In the body of the message type:
unsubscribe right-to-water
To Subscribe, please send an email to listserv@iatp.org. In the body of the message type:
subscribe right-to-water
To view the archive, go to www.iatp.org/listarchive
For a list of other commands and list options, please send email to listserv@iatp.org.
In the body of the message type:
help
Please direct content questions about this list to: mritchie@iatp.org
Please direct technical questions about this service to: support@iatp.org
----- End of forwarded message from Right to Water -----