Daniel sent us this one — he wants to talk about water desalination in Israel. Specifically, how Israel became a pioneer in the field, and how water agreements with neighbors have managed to bypass political divisions. There's a lot to unpack here, and honestly, most people don't realize how completely this technology has reshaped the region.
They really don't. And I think the starting point has to be just how dire the water situation was. Israel in the early two thousands was facing what hydrologists were calling a catastrophic drought. The Sea of Galilee, which is the country's main natural freshwater reservoir, was dropping to levels that threatened irreversible salinization. We're talking about the lake literally turning brackish.
Which is the freshwater equivalent of your retirement fund hitting zero. No coming back from that.
And this wasn't some slow-moving problem you could kick down the road. By two thousand eight, the water authority was projecting that within a few years, the national water system might not be able to meet basic municipal demand, let alone agricultural or industrial use. The country had been aware of the vulnerability since at least the nineteen fifties — David Ben-Gurion talked about making the desert bloom, but that was mostly irrigation and aquifer management. By the early two thousands, those tools weren't enough.
Because you don't go from water crisis to water surplus without some kind of inflection point.
The inflection point was a combination of desperation and technological maturity. Reverse osmosis had been around since the sixties, but it was expensive and energy-hungry. The key breakthrough was in membrane technology — specifically, spiral-wound thin-film composite membranes that could filter seawater at much lower pressures. That dropped the energy cost per cubic meter dramatically. Israel didn't invent reverse osmosis, but it did something arguably more important: it figured out how to scale it efficiently and cheaply.
This is where IDE Technologies enters the picture, I assume.
IDE Technologies is the protagonist in this story, yes. They were founded in the sixties, originally working on thermal desalination, but they pivoted hard into reverse osmosis. By two thousand five, they had built the Ashkelon plant, which at the time was the largest reverse osmosis desalination facility in the world. It was producing about a hundred million cubic meters of water per year. That's roughly fifteen percent of Israel's domestic water consumption at the time, from a single plant.
Fifteen percent from one facility. That's the kind of number that makes you sit up and reconsider what's possible.
Ashkelon was just the opening act. The big one — and I mean the one that really changed the calculus — was Sorek. Sorek came online in twenty thirteen, about fifteen kilometers south of Tel Aviv. It was producing over a hundred and fifty million cubic meters annually, and it did it at a cost that was almost unthinkable a decade earlier. We're talking about fifty-eight US cents per cubic meter. That's cheaper than pumping water from the Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee. Cheaper than treating and transporting surface water.
Desalinated seawater became the economically rational choice, not just the desperate backup plan. That's a genuine paradigm shift.
It's the moment where the technology crossed from survival strategy to competitive advantage. And it's worth dwelling on that fifty-eight cent figure, because it's not just a number — it represents a whole cascade of innovations. IDE developed proprietary pressure exchanger systems that recover energy from the brine stream. They optimized the membrane configuration to reduce fouling. They built the plants with vertical layouts that minimize the footprint. Every one of those decisions shaved fractions of a cent off the cost, and those fractions added up.
The sloth in me appreciates the methodical optimization. Though I should point out, my kind doesn't do water stress — we get most of our hydration from leaves, which is basically nature's slow-release water capsule.
I'm not sure that's scientifically accurate.
Leaf medicine teaches that the moisture gradient in a Cecropia leaf is optimal for—
We're not doing leaf medicine right now.
So Sorek was the game-changer. What came after?
Sorek B, which is essentially an expansion, came online in stages, and there's now a Sorek two that's even larger. By twenty twenty-two, Israel had five major desalination plants — Ashkelon, Palmachim, Hadera, Sorek, and Ashdod — producing about five hundred and eighty-five million cubic meters annually. That's roughly eighty percent of the country's municipal and industrial water consumption. The Mediterranean had effectively become the country's primary water source.
So the Sea of Galilee went from being the main reservoir to being... what, a backup? A heritage site?
In practical terms, yes. And that's the part of this story that doesn't get enough attention. Once desalination provided a reliable baseline, Israel could actually let the Kinneret recover. They could manage it as an ecological asset rather than a resource to be drained. The lake's water level became something you could protect, not something you had to sacrifice. That's a complete inversion of the historical relationship between a society and its freshwater source.
Which brings us to the second part of the prompt — the agreements with neighbors. Because if you're no longer desperately dependent on shared freshwater sources, that changes the negotiating dynamic entirely.
It changes everything. Let's talk about Jordan. The nineteen ninety-four peace treaty between Israel and Jordan included water-sharing provisions that entitled Jordan to a specific allocation from the Jordan River and the Yarmouk River. But those allocations were never sufficient for Jordan's growing population, and the country has been in a perpetual water crisis — exacerbated by the influx of refugees from Syria and Iraq. By the twenty-tens, Amman was sometimes receiving municipal water only once a week.
Once a week. That's not a water shortage, that's a civilization-scale stress test.
It's the kind of stress that destabilizes governments. So in twenty twenty-one, Israel and Jordan signed a new agreement — and this is where desalination becomes a diplomatic tool. Under the deal, Israel would supply Jordan with fifty million cubic meters of water annually. That's on top of the existing treaty obligations. And the mechanism is interesting: Israel essentially sells Jordan water from its desalination surplus, while Jordan agrees to allow Israel to pump additional water from the Jordan River basin in certain areas.
It's a swap. Desalinated water from the coast in exchange for freshwater rights inland. Both sides get something they need.
The subtext is that this agreement happened under the Bennett government, at a time when the Palestinian issue was as frozen as ever, and Jordan's King Abdullah was publicly frustrated with Israeli policy. The water deal didn't fix those political tensions — but it happened anyway, because the material need was too urgent to wait for a political resolution.
Water as a parallel track. You don't have to like each other to trade in survival resources.
And the same pattern shows up with the Palestinians. The Israeli water company Mekorot supplies tens of millions of cubic meters annually to the Palestinian Authority, particularly in the West Bank, where the mountain aquifer is the primary source. The Oslo Accords created a joint water committee, but it's been dysfunctional for years. Despite that, water continues to flow. It's not a kumbaya story — there are deep inequities in access and infrastructure — but the desalination capacity has given Israel the slack to maintain supply even when political channels break down.
There's a phrase I've seen in some of the analysis: "water security as a public good that transcends borders." Which sounds noble, but what you're describing is more pragmatic than that. It's not altruism, it's enlightened self-interest. A neighbor in water crisis is a neighbor who might do desperate things.
That's the realist reading. But I think there's also a genuine institutional commitment here. Israel's water sector operates with a remarkable degree of autonomy from political cycles. The Water Authority is a professional body, and Mekorot is a state-owned company that functions like a utility, not a political instrument. The engineers and hydrologists who negotiate these agreements tend to think in terms of watersheds and aquifers, which don't respect borders. That creates a kind of technical diplomacy that can operate below the political radar.
The technocrats keeping the taps on while the politicians shout at each other. There's something almost comforting about that.
It's the opposite of exciting, which is exactly why it works. Let me give you another example. In twenty twenty-two, Israel, Jordan, and the UAE signed a memorandum of understanding for a massive project called Project Prosperity. The idea is that Jordan would build a large solar farm in its desert, Israel would build an additional desalination plant on its coast, and they'd trade: Jordanian solar energy for Israeli desalinated water. The UAE provides financing and project management.
You're essentially creating a regional utility market that bypasses the political bottlenecks. Solar from one country, water from another, capital from a third.
The scale is ambitious. We're talking about six hundred megawatts of solar capacity in Jordan, and two hundred million cubic meters of desalinated water annually from Israel. That's enough water to supply a significant portion of Jordan's needs, powered by renewable energy that doesn't touch the Jordanian grid's fossil fuel dependency.
What's the status of that project now?
It's moving slowly — these things always do — but the framework agreement was signed at COP twenty-seven, and there's been continued technical cooperation. The Abraham Accords created the diplomatic opening for the UAE's involvement, but the underlying logic is purely infrastructural. Water and energy are fungible in ways that territory and sovereignty are not. You can trade them without resolving the big political questions.
That fungibility is what makes desalination a strategic asset, not just a utility service. You mentioned the Abraham Accords — how much did those actually accelerate this?
They helped, but I'd argue the foundation was laid years earlier. The real acceleration happened between two thousand five and twenty fifteen, when the desalination plants came online and Israel went from water scarcity to water surplus. The Abraham Accords created new partnership structures, but the physical infrastructure and the technical expertise were already there. What the Accords did was allow the conversation to happen openly and ambitiously, rather than through quiet back channels.
The sequence matters. First you solve the scarcity problem domestically. Then you have something to trade. Then the diplomacy follows.
That's a lesson that applies far beyond the Middle East. Look at what's happening in North Africa, in parts of South Asia, in the American Southwest. Water stress is becoming a defining challenge of the century. The Israeli model — and I use that word carefully, because "model" implies replicability — suggests that desalination plus good water management can turn a crisis into an opportunity. But it requires massive capital investment, cheap energy, and a regulatory framework that lets utilities operate efficiently.
Let's talk about the energy piece, because that's the obvious counterpoint. Desalination is energy-intensive. If you're powering it with fossil fuels, you're trading water security for carbon emissions.
That's the tension, and it's a real one. The Sorek plant, for example, consumes about three and a half kilowatt-hours per cubic meter of water produced. That's down from over eight kilowatt-hours in older plants, but it's still significant. Israel's plants are powered by the national grid, which as of twenty twenty-six is still substantially reliant on natural gas. The long-term vision is to couple desalination with renewable energy — that's part of what makes the Jordan solar swap so conceptually elegant — but we're not there yet at scale.
The next frontier is green desalination. Solar-powered reverse osmosis at a cost that doesn't break the economics.
There's interesting work happening on that. IDE and other companies are experimenting with desalination plants that can ramp production up and down to match solar output, rather than running continuously. That's a non-trivial engineering challenge, because reverse osmosis membranes don't love being cycled on and off — it increases fouling and reduces membrane life. But if you can solve that, you've got a plant that produces water when the sun shines and rests when it doesn't, with minimal carbon footprint.
The intermittent desalination plant. Sounds like my approach to productivity.
Your approach to productivity is sleeping eighteen hours a day.
I'm matching my output to available energy. It's the same principle.
It's really not. But speaking of productivity, let me give you some numbers that put Israel's achievement in global context. As of twenty twenty-four, Israel produces about eighty-five percent of its domestic water from desalination. Saudi Arabia produces about fifty percent. The United Arab Emirates, about forty-two percent. The United States? Less than half a percent. California has been talking about desalination for decades, and they've built a handful of plants, but the regulatory and environmental hurdles have made it extremely difficult to scale.
What's the bottleneck in California? They've got a coastline, they've got engineering talent, they've got water stress. What's missing?
One, environmental review — the California Coastal Commission and various environmental groups have raised legitimate concerns about marine life impacts from intake pipes and brine discharge. Two, cost allocation — who pays for the plant, and how are those costs passed on to ratepayers? Three, and this is the one that doesn't get talked about enough, there's no single entity with the authority to just build the thing. Israel's water sector is nationally managed. California's is fragmented across hundreds of local water districts. There's no one with the mandate to say, "We're building a desalination plant and it's going to serve the whole region.
It's a governance problem masquerading as a technology problem.
It's almost always a governance problem masquerading as a technology problem. The technology works. Sorek has been operating for over a decade. The membranes are better than ever. The energy consumption keeps dropping. The question is whether the political and regulatory systems can organize themselves to deploy the technology at the scale required.
Which brings us back to the Middle East, where the governance structure is... let's say, less fragmented than California's, but the political environment is considerably more complicated.
Yet the water flows. That's the paradox at the heart of this story. You've got a region defined by conflict, by failed negotiations, by mutual distrust that goes back generations. And underneath all of that, there's a network of pipes and pumps and membranes that quietly moves water across borders according to technical agreements negotiated by engineers. It's not peace. It's not even cooperation in the diplomatic sense. But it's something.
It's infrastructure as the lowest common denominator of coexistence. You don't have to agree on borders to agree that people need water.
Desalination makes that agreement possible, because it removes the zero-sum dynamic. When the only water sources are the Jordan River and the mountain aquifer, every cubic meter one side uses is a cubic meter the other side doesn't get. That's a recipe for conflict. But when you can manufacture water from the sea, the pie gets bigger. You can give Jordan fifty million cubic meters without taking it from Israeli farmers. You can supply the Palestinian Authority without draining the Kinneret.
That's still a strange phrase to say out loud. We're so used to thinking of water as something you find, not something you make.
That mental shift is maybe the most important legacy of Israel's desalination program. It changed the conceptual framework from water as a finite natural resource to water as a manufactured good. Once you make that shift, the whole policy conversation changes. You start thinking about production costs and distribution networks and energy inputs, rather than rights and allocations and scarcity management.
The commodification of water. Some people find that troubling.
They do, and I understand why. Water has a special moral status — it's essential for life in a way that other commodities aren't. But the alternative to commodification in water-scarce regions isn't some pristine natural abundance. It's rationing. It's standpipes in the street. It's women and children spending hours a day carrying water. The moral case for desalination is that it replaces that with a reliable, safe, affordable supply. The fact that it's priced like a commodity doesn't change the fact that it's reaching people's taps.
There's a pragmatic humanitarianism in that. You can debate the philosophical implications while people are drinking clean water.
Israel's water sector has been remarkably effective at delivering that outcome. The World Health Organization standard for water access is a hundred liters per person per day. Israel's per capita water consumption is around a hundred and fifty to two hundred liters, and it's stable even during drought years. That's the desalination buffer at work. Compare that to Jordan, where per capita availability is under a hundred liters, or Gaza, where it's even lower and the aquifer is contaminated with seawater intrusion and untreated sewage.
Gaza is the part of this story that's hardest to talk about, because the water situation there is genuinely catastrophic, and the political context makes infrastructure solutions almost impossible.
It's a tragedy on multiple levels. Gaza sits right on the Mediterranean. The same sea that supplies Israel's desalination plants is right there. But the blockade, the lack of electricity, the damaged infrastructure, the restrictions on construction materials — all of it means that even basic water treatment is a struggle, let alone large-scale desalination. There are small desalination units in Gaza, some funded by international donors, but they're nowhere near sufficient.
That's the limit case for the "water transcends politics" argument. It does, until it doesn't.
That's why I think we have to be careful not to overstate the lesson here. Israel's desalination success is real and impressive, and the cross-border water agreements are genuine achievements. But they operate within a specific set of conditions — a technologically advanced economy, a centralized water authority, access to international capital markets, and a security situation that, however tense, allows large infrastructure to be built and maintained. Those conditions don't exist everywhere.
What's the exportable piece? If you're a policymaker in, say, Morocco or Peru or the Philippines, what do you take from the Israeli experience?
I'd point to three things. First, invest in the technology early and commit to the learning curve. Israel didn't wait for desalination to be perfectly cheap — they built Ashkelon when the costs were still relatively high, and the operational experience from that plant fed directly into the efficiency gains at Sorek. Second, centralize water management. Give a single authority the mandate to plan, build, and operate water infrastructure at national scale. Fragmentation kills these projects. Third, price water realistically. Israel made the political decision to charge consumers the actual cost of water, which created the revenue stream to finance the desalination buildout. That's politically difficult everywhere, but it's essential.
That third point is the one that makes politicians wince. Telling voters they're going to pay what water actually costs.
Yet the alternative is worse. Underpriced water leads to overconsumption, underinvestment, and eventually crisis. Israel learned this the hard way in the nineties and early two thousands, when agricultural water subsidies created perverse incentives to grow water-intensive crops in a desert. The reforms that accompanied the desalination push included significant water price increases for farmers, which was politically brutal but economically necessary. The result is that Israeli agriculture now relies heavily on treated wastewater and precision drip irrigation, with desalinated water as a municipal and industrial supply.
Drip irrigation is its own parallel story. Israel basically invented the modern version of that too.
Netafim, the Israeli company that commercialized drip irrigation, was founded in nineteen sixty-five at Kibbutz Hatzerim. The basic idea — delivering water directly to plant roots through perforated tubes — was actually discovered by accident. A researcher named Simcha Blass noticed that a tree near a leaking faucet was growing better than the surrounding trees. He realized the slow, targeted drip was more efficient than flood irrigation. That observation eventually became a global industry.
The same country that figured out how to use water more efficiently in agriculture also figured out how to manufacture more water when efficiency wasn't enough. There's a throughline there.
The throughline is necessity-driven innovation. Israel has always been water-poor relative to its population and agricultural ambitions. That constraint forced a culture of obsessive optimization — every drop counts, literally. Desalination is the logical endpoint of that culture. If you can't find more water, you learn to make it. If you can't make it cheaply enough, you iterate until you can.
Let's talk about the brine issue, because no conversation about desalination is complete without addressing the environmental downside. You're pulling salt out of seawater, which means you're left with very salty brine that has to go somewhere.
That somewhere is usually back into the sea. The brine from Israel's Mediterranean plants is discharged through diffusers that mix it with ambient seawater to minimize the local salinity spike. The environmental impact studies have generally shown that the effects are localized and manageable, but it's not zero. There are concerns about the long-term impact on benthic ecosystems — the organisms that live on the seafloor — particularly from the chemicals used to clean the membranes.
It's a trade-off. You protect terrestrial freshwater ecosystems by stressing marine ones, at least to some degree.
The question is whether that trade-off is worth it, which depends on your alternatives. If the alternative is draining the Sea of Galilee until it becomes a saline lake, or overpumping the coastal aquifer until it's contaminated with seawater intrusion, the brine discharge looks like the lesser evil. But it's not a solved problem. There's interesting research on zero-liquid-discharge desalination, where you essentially evaporate the brine and recover the salt as a solid product, but the energy cost is prohibitive at scale.
The salt itself has value, though. Industrial salt, road salt, chemical feedstock.
It does, and there are pilot projects exploring brine mining — extracting minerals like magnesium, lithium, and even rare earth elements from desalination brine. If those economics work out, brine goes from being a waste product to a revenue stream, and the environmental calculus changes completely. But we're not there yet commercially.
The next generation of desalination plants might be more like refineries — producing water as the primary output, but also salt, minerals, maybe even hydrogen from the electrolysis of brine.
That's the vision. Integrated water-energy-mineral facilities on the coast. It sounds futuristic, but the individual technologies all exist. The challenge is integration and cost. And this is where Israel's startup ecosystem might have something to contribute — there are already companies working on brine valorization, on membrane materials that resist fouling, on AI-driven plant optimization. The desalination story isn't finished; we're maybe in the middle of the second act.
If we zoom back out — Israel went from water crisis to water surplus in about fifteen years, built the world's largest and most efficient desalination plants, and used the resulting abundance to stabilize water relations with neighbors who aren't always friendly. What's the single most underappreciated part of that story?
I think it's the institutional piece. Everyone focuses on the technology — the membranes, the pressure exchangers, the energy recovery systems. And that technology is impressive. But the reason Israel succeeded where other water-stressed regions haven't is that it built institutions capable of making long-term infrastructure decisions and sticking with them through political transitions. The Water Authority, Mekorot, the planning committees — these aren't glamorous, but they're the reason the plants got built. Technology is necessary but not sufficient. Governance is the binding constraint.
Governance and the willingness to charge people what water actually costs. Which is maybe the least popular policy position in the world.
It's right up there with telling people their gasoline should be more expensive. But the alternative is a water system that can't finance its own maintenance, let alone expansion. And in water-scarce regions, that's not a policy choice — it's a slow-motion disaster.
To wrap this around to the prompt's framing — desalination didn't just change Israel's water supply. It changed the geometry of regional water politics. When water is scarce and zero-sum, every river and aquifer is a potential flashpoint. When water can be manufactured, the flashpoints don't disappear, but they become less existential. You can negotiate from a position of abundance rather than scarcity.
That's the exportable insight. If you're a water-stressed country with a coastline, desalination isn't just an infrastructure investment. It's a strategic hedge. It gives you options. It lets you make water agreements that would be politically impossible if you were fighting over a fixed pie. The technology isn't a panacea — it doesn't solve the environmental challenges, and it's not accessible to landlocked countries or those without the capital to build the plants. But for those who can deploy it, it fundamentally changes what's possible.
There's something almost poetic about the fact that the same Mediterranean Sea that has been a source of conflict and migration and contested maritime borders is also the source of the water that might, in some small way, help stabilize the region. The sea as provider rather than barrier.
That's a nice image. Though I should note that the Mediterranean is also where the brine goes, so it's provider and recipient.
Very on-brand for twenty twenty-six.
Don't say the year.
You just did.
I'm acknowledging that you said it.
Let's move on before we get into a recursive loop. One question I want to put on the table before we close — what happens if the energy equation changes? If electricity prices spike, or if carbon pricing makes natural gas more expensive, does the desalination economics hold up?
That's the vulnerability. Desalination is fundamentally an energy play. The fifty-eight cents per cubic meter at Sorek assumes a certain electricity price. If that price doubles, the water cost doesn't double — energy is roughly forty percent of the operating cost — but it goes up significantly. Which is why the renewable energy coupling is so important. If you can power desalination with solar at two or three cents per kilowatt-hour, you've insulated yourself from fossil fuel price volatility. And you've made the environmental case stronger at the same time.
The next chapter of this story is probably about integrating desalination with the renewable energy buildout. Solar during the day, maybe storage or hydrogen for nighttime production, optimized membrane cycling.
That's where Israel's hydrogen strategy connects. If you're building out five to ten gigawatts of electrolyzer capacity by twenty thirty-five, as the government has targeted, a lot of that is going to be solar-powered and coastal. You could colocate hydrogen production with desalination — use the desalinated water as feedstock for electrolysis, use the oxygen byproduct for wastewater treatment, use the waste heat from electrolysis to preheat seawater for the reverse osmosis process. The synergies are real.
The integrated coastal energy-water-hydrogen complex. Sounds like a strategy game tech tree.
It kind of is. And Israel is uniquely positioned to build it, because it's already got the desalination infrastructure, it's already got the solar resources, and it's already got the centralized planning capacity. The pieces are on the board.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The last full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal person, Truganini, died in eighteen seventy-six. But in the seventeen eighties, a Basque whaler named José María wrote the first known word list of a Tasmanian language — and linguists later realized that, unlike every other language in the region, Tasmanian languages showed traces of ergative-absolutive alignment, a grammatical structure otherwise found in Basque itself. One whaler, one word list, and a grammatical ghost that still hasn't been fully explained.
A Basque sailor accidentally documented the one language family in the Pacific that shared a grammatical quirk with his own.
That is either an extraordinary coincidence or evidence of a linguistic connection that prehistory lost. Either way, I need to read more about this.
Thank you, Hilbert. That's going to sit with me.
This has been My Weird Prompts, with me, Herman Poppleberry.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for making this happen. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review — it helps other people find the show. We'll be back soon.
