Sorek Desalination Plant

The Sorek desalination plant, on the Mediterranean shore beside Palmachim about 15 kilometers south of Tel Aviv, began operating in 2013 as the largest seawater reverse-osmosis plant in the world. Built by the Israeli company IDE Technologies, it turns about 150 million cubic meters of seawater a year, some 624,000 cubic meters a day, into drinking water. Its engineers stood the large 16-inch membrane tubes upright instead of in long horizontal racks, saving space, pipes and energy, and the water was sold at about 58 US cents per cubic meter, a record low price for desalinated water at the time.

Sorek was the fourth of the great plants on Israel's coast, after Ashkelon, Palmachim and Hadera, which Israel began building after the droughts of the early 2000s. Together with recycling nearly 90 percent of its wastewater for farming, desalination turned a country that is more than half desert from chronic shortage to surplus, so that it now supplies most of Israel's household water and even sells water to Jordan. IDE later won the contract for Sorek 2, beside it, planned for 200 million cubic meters a year.