My wag as to why the Israelis are not tooting their horns about water independence is that desalination work pales in comparison to the desalination being done in Gulf States. The Israelis have only got into desalination in a big way in the last ten years. The Gulf states have been the worlds biggest consumers of desalination technology for about five decades. They use their dirt cheap oil and gas to fire their electricity plants that run the desalination plants—so their costs are pretty low. So low that you can see circular green fields from space where the saudis use desalinized water to grow crops. Their costs are still to high to be competitive on a global scale. But food independence is a big deal in that part of the world in the same way energy independence is in much of the rest of the world.
——saudis use desalinized water to grow crops.-—
That is I believe, waste water run through the cities and then recycled on the farms
-——They use their dirt cheap oil and gas-——
Hence my thought that we have learned that California sits on shale that could yield prodigious quantities of gas. They shun the use
If the extracted gas is taxed in gas rather than $$ desalinization at an inexpensive rate becomes possible. Of course there is fixed plant costs, but the presence of the produced water has huge economic benefit to off set that cost.
The irony here is that they came from Saudi Arabia and Dubai to California and Arizona and learned how living in comfort in the desert is possible. They took all those lessons home, including the architect and engineer designers, and applied them.
It is now time for Californians to go east to observe how to manufacture water.