Posted on 01/12/2025 4:34:45 PM PST by grundle
Ten miles south of Tel Aviv, I stand on a catwalk over two concrete reservoirs the size of football fields and watch water pour into them from a massive pipe emerging from the sand. The pipe is so large I could walk through it standing upright, were it not full of Mediterranean seawater pumped from an intake a mile offshore.
“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, who recently joined Israel’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research after completing his postdoc work at Yale University, is an expert on biofouling, which has always been an Achilles’ heel of desalination and one of the reasons it has been considered a last resort. Desal works by pushing saltwater into membranes containing microscopic pores. The water gets through, while the larger salt molecules are left behind. But microorganisms in seawater quickly colonize the membranes and block the pores, and controlling them requires periodic costly and chemical-intensive cleaning. But 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.
In May 2022, California regulators rejected a desalination plant because the returned effluent would make the Pacific Ocean too salty.
Maybe they could find some vacant lots in Pacific Palisades to use for desalination plants?
Should have retortd to that argument with the fact that allowing too much fresh water into the Pacific dilutes the oceanic salt thus harming the fish!
I’m fairly certain some of our tax-dollars are somewhere in that mix. Be nice if they’d share the tech with US assuming we’re wise enough to build it in multiples.
It’s rarely Scientific and certainly no longer American....
Large desalination plants can produce fresh water almost as cheaply as California can import fresh water from the Colorado river. The costs actually overlap in estimates, with Colorado river water being fractionally cheaper.
Elon Musk left both places.
Interesting that planet’s fifth largest economy, with 840 mile of shoreline, has zero interest in desalination, is blowing up dams, and retiring its only nuke plant.
Israel CARED about their people.
looks like filtration is used there. I am surprised at the 50M gpd volume! I assumed major desalinization was steam/condensation. I wonder how many gallons a single filter is good for?..
Israel has been depleting the Jordan River for decades.
This is great news as they were looking at a serious problem in another 20 years.
California should learn from what Israel has done vs attacking them.
You’re good.
Commiefornia is doing that to the Colorado River.
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