In Israel, Desalinization Has a Created Abundance of Water, Even in the Desert
I just read a very inspiring article in Scientific American about how Israel has built the world’s largest desalinization plant, and they not only are water sufficient, they have water to spare. Water is the crucial battle of the decades ahead….even a short drought can have such a terrible impact. This is encouraging that in the Middle East desalinization is taking root, and it is going to be the savior for the folks who live there. Here is a snip of the story by Rowan Jacobson.
“Now, that’s a pump!” Edo Bar-Zeev shouts to me over the din of the motors, grinning with undisguised awe at the scene before us. The reservoirs beneath us contain several feet of sand through which the seawater filters before making its way to a vast metal hangar, where it is transformed into enough drinking water to supply 1.5 million people.
We are standing above the new Sorek desalination plant, the largest reverse-osmosis desal facility in the world, and we are staring at Israel’s salvation. Just a few years ago, in the depths of its worst drought in at least 900 years, Israel was running out of water. Now it has a surplus. That remarkable turnaround was accomplished through national campaigns to conserve and reuse Israel’s meager water resources, but the biggest impact came from a new wave of desalination plants.”
Bar-Zeev and colleagues developed a chemical-free system using porous lava stone to capture the microorganisms before they reach the membranes. It’s just one of many breakthroughs in membrane technology that have made desalination much more efficient. Israel now gets 55 percent of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped to turn one of the world’s driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.”