Soaring Heat In North Africa and the Persian Gulf Can Make It Uninhabitable

Desalinization plants and growing hemp fields as a border between arable lands and the coast would create a paradise in North Africa!The world’s largest and cheapest reverse-osmosis desalination plant is up and running in Israel.the world’s largest modern seawater desalination plant, providing 20 percent of the water consumed by the country’s households. Built for the Israeli government by Israel Desalination Enterprises, or IDE Technologies, at a cost of around $500 million, it uses a conventional desalination technology called reverse osmosis (RO). Thanks to a series of engineering and materials advances, however, it produces clean water from the sea cheaply and at a scale never before achieved.

Demonstrating that seawater desalination can cost-effectively provide a substantial portion of a nation’s water supply.

Why It Matters?The world’s supplies of fresh water are inadequate to meet the needs of a growing population.

Key Players

IDE Technologies

Poseidon Water

Desalitech

Evoqua

Worldwide, some 700 million people don’t have access to enough clean water. In 10 years the number is expected to explode to 1.8 billion. In many places, squeezing fresh water from the ocean might be the only viable way to increase the supply.

The new plant in Israel, called Sorek, was finished in late 2013 but is just now ramping up to its full capacity; it will produce 627,000 cubic meters of water daily, providing evidence that such large desalination facilities are practical. Indeed, desalinated seawater is now a mainstay of the Israeli water supply. Whereas in 2004 the country relied entirely on groundwater and rain, it now has four seawater desalination plants running; Sorek is the largest. Those plants account for 40 percent of Israel’s water supply. By 2016, when additional plants will be running, some 50 percent of the country’s water is expected to come from desalination.