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Even new desalination plants will do little to ease water crisis
Hanan Sher

After three years of drought, Israel is belatedly launching a serious effort to supplement its dwindling water reserves with desalinated seawater. But the first plants, which will not be operational before 2003, will hardly make a dent in the country's 400-million-cubic-meter cumula-tive shortage.

The government is about to choose the winning bid from three for the contract to build and operate a $200 million, 50 million cu.m.-a-year plant at Ashkelon. And bidding is to begin soon on a $120-million, 45-million-cubic-meter-plant at Ashdod, to be built for the Mekorot national water company.

Mekorot spokesperson Merav Arlozorov says that because some infrastructure already exists at Ashdod, her company's facility "will be operational within 18 months of the contract being awarded - making it the first desalination plant on Israel's Mediterranean coast." (A small plant has been operating at Eilat on the Red Sea for three decades.) The Ashkelon plant, next to the Israel Electric Corp. generating facility in the southern coastal city, won't start running until late 2004.

By the time both plants are completed, all of their 95 million cu.m. output will be needed just to cover increased water consumption during the time they are being built: Over the past decade, consumption has increased by about 30 million cu.m. a year.

Still, water experts point out, the decision to build the two large plants represents the first positive step forward after years of neglect of the water problem by successive administrations.

"The tendency," former water commissioner Meir Ben-Meir told a Knesset commission in mid-June, "has been to stretch the blanket endlessly," attempting to deal with in-creased demand without developing new sources. "Israel's water potential has not grown since the 1950s," he said.

(July 20, 2001)

  

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