EIN YAHAV, ISRAEL — Even at
night, the ground of Israel’s Arava desert pulsates with heat. For decades, the
vast expanse of bleached hills looked like a mountain biker’s paradise and a
farmer’s torment. With only about an inch of precipitation per year, not even
Israeli vegetation had the chutzpah to grow here.
But that slowly
began to change when Israeli pioneers came here in the mid-1960s. True, they
didn’t come for the soil or the weather. But farming was vital to staking out
the young state of Israel’s claim to this land along the Jordanian border. In
between fending off attacks from Palestinian militants, the settlers worked the
unforgiving soil.
They grew roses
when others said it was impossible. They created naturally air-conditioned
greenhouses by setting up “wet curtains” – honeycombed walls that allowed water
to seep through slowly. They planted flowers in trenches of volcanic ash
instead of the sandy soil. Later they switched to dates and peppers, using an
Israeli-invented drip irrigation system.
Today this former
moonscape, though still barren, has become an agricultural Eden: Rows of
greenhouses stretch across the land, harboring everything from apricots to
mangoes, avocados to pomegranates. Other crops are grown outside with plastic
stretched over them to reduce evaporation. This narrow strip of land along the
Jordanian border produces 65 percent of Israel’s vegetable exports – mainly
tomatoes and peppers – and helps feed the Jewish state itself. It’s one of the
most productive salad bowls in the Middle East.
More than
anything, the transformation of the desert here is a testament to Israel’s
innovative approach to water. Driven by a combination of necessity and
inventiveness, the country has become one of the world’s leaders in how to
wring the most out of parsimonious amounts of rainfall and turn a parched
landscape into a productive garden.
The Israelis are
turning seawater into tap water, pioneering new types of irrigation, and
reusing wastewater at the highest rate of any country in the world. Last year,
despite having the driest year on record, the country recorded a surplus of
water. As climate change creates more severe patterns of weather – including,
notably, devastating droughts – Israeli technology and ideas are increasingly
being adopted around the world.
To be sure, Israel
is a far smaller country than most of those with the most pressing water needs.
But proponents say many of its practices can still be used elsewhere. Already,
Israelis have big water projects under way in China, India, and drought-stricken
California.
“Israel is very
much a beta test site for solving these problems in a small country,” says
Glenn Yago, founder of the Financial Innovation Lab at the California-based
Milken Institute, who is fostering increased Israeli investment in water
projects in California. “Drip irrigation, desalination, [wastewater] recycling,
and aquifer remediation – those are problems that can be tested in the global
laboratory that Israel is and then scaled elsewhere.”
As with everything
in this part of the world, however, politics intrudes on the narrative here,
too: Palestinians claim that Israel is taking more than its prescribed
allotment of water from shared aquifers, and environmental concerns swirl about
the effect of the country operating so many desalination plants along the
eastern Mediterranean. But Israel’s surplus of water has also opened new
opportunities for water cooperation with its Arab neighbors – and, perhaps,
more flexibility.
• •
•
The story of
making the desert bloom here begins with a man in a top
hat.
Back in the 1960s
Simcha Blass, an immigrant from Poland, was traveling around the torrid Israeli
desert in a three-piece suit, white gloves up to his elbows, and that imposing
lid, looking like a European duke. He was, in fact, a water engineer, one of
the foremost in Israel, who had helped to establish its first aqueducts and
pipelines. (One of those plumbing systems was made from salvaged pipes from
postwar London, which had been used to put out fires during the German blitz.)
Now he was
tinkering with an idea to help make things grow where they shouldn’t: drip
irrigation. But none of the young kibbutzniks working the dusty clods of the
Negev desert were interested.
Until one day in
1965 Uri Werber knocked on Mr. Blass’s door in Tel Aviv. Before Mr. Werber even
had a chance to introduce himself, the eccentric water engineer said, “You know
what you are? You are an idiot.... No one is listening to me. Why are you
coming here?”
Werber represented
Kibbutz Hatzerim, one of 11 farming settlements set up overnight in the Negev
in 1947, the year before Israel declared independence. It was so desolate that
one knoll was known then, and still is today, as the “hill of the only tree.”
The only water for growing vegetables was the runoff from a primitive shower
house.
Two decades later,
the kibbutz had grown to about 100 people, and Werber was looking for a small
business to employ about a dozen of its members. He’d suggested manufacturing
everything from traffic lights to chandeliers, but drip irrigation was closer
to their farming roots.
So there on
Blass’s doorstep, Werber insisted he wanted to hear more about his invention.
Blass had developed it after a farmer friend pointed out a tree that was far
larger than those around it. The reason, they discovered, was a small leak in a
hose that spritzed water on the tree’s roots.
Werber went back
to Hatzerim with the proposal – to build a system of perforated pipes that
would water crops with judicious regularity. The kibbutz approved it. Initially,
the group’s farm manager was so impressed with the results – drip irrigation
both reduces water usage and increases crop yield, resulting in as much as four
times more produce for the same amount of water – that he wanted to keep it as
the kibbutz’s secret weapon.
Instead, the
kibbutz founded Netafim, whose technology was piloted first on dusty Israeli
farms and then exported around the world. Today, from its lush campus on
Kibbutz Hatzerim, the company commands more than 30 percent of the global market
for drip irrigation systems, with customers in 110 countries.
“To me there’s no
question that drip irrigation made the desert bloom,” says Naty Barak,
Netafim’s chief sustainability officer, who sees special potential for the
company’s technology in California, where he opened Netafim’s first subsidiary
back in 1981. “Israel has an answer to California’s drought.”
While drip
irrigation is now a well-established technique, Netafim is always working to
refine its technology, using the Arava as a prime laboratory, just as it has
for decades.
“We are under
tough and extreme conditions – soil, water, weather,” says Effi Tripler, a soil
and water scientist from the Central and Northern Arava Research and
Development Center in Hatzeva. “They know if it works here, it will work in any
place in the world.”
The R&D
center, one of several in Israeli agricultural areas, experiments with
everything from sophisticated new drip irrigation techniques to aquaculture.
The center also tests different varieties of mangoes, apricots, and other
fruits and vegetables to determine which ones can best endure the harsh
conditions of the Arava, where temperatures range from freezing to more than
100 degrees F. in the summer, and the parched soil receives only about an inch
of precipitation per year.
“Plants are very
smart,” says Dr. Tripler, who has beads of sweat collecting on his face despite
the early hour. In cooperation with Netafim and other researchers, he’s
refining a sophisticated drip irrigation system that waters plants only when
they’re thirsty. The system, which is installed here in a small plot of
sorghum, includes four solar-powered sensors that connect wirelessly to a
control panel at the edge of the plot and measures the suction of the plants’
roots to gauge their thirst. A similar system will be installed at the
University of California, Davis in the fall. By reading the signals of the
plants, the system helps farmers maximize their water use.
“For the growers,
this is their GPS,” says Tripler, who spent 15 years overseeing a date-palm
plantation near the Dead Sea.
Decreasing water
usage in agriculture holds some of the most potential to help the world husband
a precious resource, since agriculture accounts for about 70 percent of water
usage globally. The most common method of watering fields is flood irrigation,
which pumps or otherwise channels water into fields and lets it flow among the
crops. The problem with the technique is that it requires flat land and uses
vast amounts of water, much of which is lost.
Drip irrigation
could reduce water usage dramatically and make it possible to utilize hillier
land as well, says Mr. Barak of Netafim. Yet global adoption of drip irrigation
remains below 5 percent, compared with 75 percent in Israel. That’s largely
because of the cost of installing such a system. Water is still free in many
places, which makes it financially hard to justify such an investment.
Barak says
sometimes he wakes up in the morning and feels “so proud” that what has been
done out in the Israeli desert is now gaining awareness around the world.
“[But] sometimes I wake up in the morning and say, ‘What’s happening? We have a
solution to the most pressing issues and it’s not picking up.’ ”
• •
•
About the
time that Blass was peddling his drip irrigation
technology around the Negev, American chemical engineer Sidney Loeb was
devising a new way to turn seawater into drinking water.
In those early
days of desalination, there were two main methods of separating out the salt:
freezing or distillation. But Mr. Loeb, along with another graduate student at
the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), developed reverse osmosis
(RO) desalination, in which seawater is forced through membranes that block the
salt but allow the water to pass through.
In 1965, the first
commercially viable RO plant was established in Coalinga, Calif.; it was run by
firemen in between putting out blazes. Its output was small – 5,000 gallons of
water per day – but it supplied a third of the town’s fresh water. The next
year, a second commercial plant was established in the Israeli kibbutz of
Yotvata in the Arava desert, along Jordan’s border. According to Loeb, who
moved to Israel in 1966, women brought buckets to the plant to wash their hair
in the soft water, but skeptical residents initially refused to drink it.
Experts didn’t
think much of the technology at first, either. Indeed, it took decades for RO
to be used on a large scale, even though Israel was suffering periodic water
shortages. In the mid-1980s, the problem became so severe that Israel’s
minister of agriculture recommended that everyone shower in pairs to save
water.
Then in 1999, the
Israeli water commissioner came up with a master plan for 2000 to 2010 that
called for wide-scale desalination to help close a water gap of 400 million
cubic meters a year. The Israeli government agreed to produce 50 mcm of
desalinated water – an important, if small, first step, says Abraham Tenne,
head of the desalination division at the Israel Water Authority. “Usually the
first decision is the most important because you crossed the line.”
In 2003, IDE won a
contract with the French firm Veolia to build a seawater RO plant in Ashkelon
that would produce 100 mcm per year, making it the largest such plant of its
kind in the world. The government agreed to a plan that would guarantee the
plant enough financial support to survive regardless of actual water demands.
“Ashkelon changed
everything,” says Tom Pankratz, editor of the Water Desalination Report and an
independent desalination consultant. Up until then, bankers had been skittish
about underwriting a large-scale plant for a technology that had yet to be
proved on such a scale.
In 2006, Ashkelon
was named “desalination plant of the year” at the Global Water Awards ceremony
in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where it was hailed as “a milestone in reverse
osmosis desalination.”
“The guys in Dubai
don’t like us too much, but even they were impressed,” says Mr. Tenne, who has
become one of Israel’s leading desalination experts almost by accident: He
signed up for Loeb’s first university class on RO because he figured an
American professor would go easy on the students.
After Ashkelon, RO
grew exponentially. From 2004 to 2014, some 74 percent of contracted
desalination plants were RO. Three of those were built in Israel – Palmachim,
Hadera, and Sorek.
Sorek, also built
by IDE, has a capacity of 150 mcm per year and came on line in 2013 as the
largest such plant in the world. Every two minutes, enough seawater to fill an
Olympic-size swimming pool is pumped nearly a mile and a half from the ocean
through massive underground pipes, which are roughly twice the height of an
average person. The water gurgles up into huge vats that screen out jellyfish
and other elements that could clog the pumps, and then goes into an array of
pretreatment pools with sand filters.
Once all solids
have been removed, the water is pumped into a phalanx of 11,200 cylinders at
high pressure. Inside the cylinders, membranes screen out the salt. Within an
hour, that Olympic-size pool of drinkable water is delivered into Israel’s
national water system and ready to come out of people’s taps.
Not everyone is
enamored of the technology, though. Environmentalists worry about the rerouting
of nature’s resources on such a massive scale. The brine discharged back into the
sea could harm the wildlife, especially with so many plants along the
Mediterranean – not just in Israel but also Cyprus, Egypt, and Algeria.
“Desalination
should always be a last resort,” says Karin Kloosterman, founder of Green
Prophet, which covers sustainability issues in the Middle East. “Desalination
is an energy-intensive process that consumes an unbalanced amount of
electricity while removing the salts from the water. The byproducts and brine
of desalination are harmful to the waterways around the desalination plant.”
Another concern is
the price. Desalinated water here costs 2.8 shekels per cubic meter ($0.66)
versus as much as four times that in Australia. Part of that is due to IDE’s
innovative plant design and operations, such as arranging the cylinders
vertically instead of horizontally to save on concrete and other structural
support materials. But in Israel the vast majority of the population, with the
exception of Jerusalem, is located within just a few miles of the coast.
California, by contrast,
is far wider and has high mountains that could add significant cost to the
price of desalinated water. A stronger environmental movement also exists
there, and significant regulatory hurdles. In addition, California has a far
more fragmented system of water control, so it can’t easily set a price for
water, and few people want to pay for desalinated water if they’re getting it
from the ground, lakes, or rivers free of charge. So, ironically, the state
where Loeb first developed RO desalination lags far behind Israel today in that
field.
IDE is building a
$1 billion plant in Carlsbad, Calif., which will be the largest in the Western
Hemisphere. But it is still relatively small and the project has faced many
complications.
“In the time it
took Carlsbad to materialize from plan to operations, we’ve built plants that
together produce daily seven times more water than Carlsbad is going to
produce,” says Hamutal Ben Bassat, IDE’s business development manager, on a
tour of the Sorek plant.
In early May, Santa
Barbara gave IDE the nod for another desalination plant, and Ms. Ben Bassat
says other projects in California are under discussion. She says IDE also
expects to see “quite a lot of activity in the US, China, and India” in the
next two years.
In China, coastal
cities that account for 40 percent of the population and 60 percent of the
total gross domestic product already face “extreme” water scarcity, according
to a report by WaterWorld, a trade publication. Last fall, Israel heralded a
“Water City” project in Shouguang, a city of 1 million where Israeli water
companies will implement their technology with the hope of winning over the
Chinese government and expanding to other cities.
Limits exist to
how far the Israeli technology can spread, however. The Arab Middle East and
North Africa represent more than 40 percent of the global market for
desalination, but so far they have been untappable by IDE for political
reasons. Nevertheless, from 2004 to 2014, the company ranked as the fourth
largest desalination plant supplier in the world.
“Basically we
build the largest plants for the lowest costs,” says Ben Bassat.
• •
•
Israel has also
been able to wring more water out of the resources it has
because, in essence, it has only one hand on the spigot. It has one water
authority that sets both policy and pricing for the whole country.
Many other nations
– including, notably, the United States – have a tangle of federal, state, and
local jurisdictions that control water issues. “Much of the issue in the US is
not so much technology, it’s governance,” says Prof. Yoram Cohen, a chemical
and biomolecular engineer at UCLA.
Indeed, hundreds
of water agencies exist in California alone. In the US, many farmers have
rights to the water and don’t pay for it, and in some places governments don’t
even have a system in place to measure water usage, making it impossible to
charge for it.
In addition to key
decisions regarding measurement and cost of water, Israel’s government has been
able to enforce national policies, such as widespread wastewater treatment and
recycling. Israel recycles more than 80 percent of its wastewater for reuse in
agriculture and other industrial processes, which is quadruple the amount of
the second largest wastewater recycler, Spain. In California, there’s still
strong public distrust of such recycling, even after rigorous treatment.
“When you say
‘reuse’ in California, it means something different ... most of the implication
there is toilet to tap,” says Mr. Pankratz. “And there has been a real stigma
with that.”
Israel also has
taken a lead in reducing water loss, with innovative companies like TaKaDu. Its
monitoring system costs about $150,000 for a big city like New York – a
relatively small price tag given that global water loss amounts to as much as
$15 billion. Among Israel’s Arab neighbors, as much as half of their water is
lost to leaks, while in London it’s about 35 percent. In Israel it’s down to 10
percent, and the country is aiming for 8 percent, says Tenne of the Israel
Water Authority, which requires the country’s water utilities to spend a
certain percentage on maintenance each year.
He says, however,
that the answer to improving global water efficiency is not in any one step,
but rather in a long-term, comprehensive approach. “There is no one single step
and there won’t be one single step in China, California, or India,” says Tenne.
“People are trying to solve problems from today to tomorrow, and it doesn’t
work. But it can be done, and Israel is a great example that it can be done.”http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2015/0621/How-Israel-defies-drought
