Mekorot’s is one of the world’s most innovative water companies in the field of water resource management. Its expertise derives from decades of innovation in the face of severe challenges, including limited freshwater resources, climates ranging from semi-arid to desert, a rapidly growing population and difficult geopolitical realities.
Mekorot has overcome these challenges through the development of cutting-edge processes that have succeeded in maximizing the utilization of Israel’s water resources, automating its treatment and delivering it to domestic, industrial and agricultural users.
Mekorot enhances the quantity of available water resources by:
- Drilling deep wells to depths of 1,500 meters and more. Approximately 1,040 water wells currently pump water throughout Israel, half of which are operated by Mekorot. Of these, 150 wells are used for recharging purposes, while the remainder are used as water sources.
- Rehabilitating old wells through the use of state-of-the-art engineering techniques, a process that costs 20% as much as drilling new wells.
- Removing contaminations from water sources to prevent their spread into aquifers.
- Wastewater treatment and reclamation through advanced treatment methods. Mekorot operates 8 water treatment plants with a daily flow of 500,000 cu.m (186 million cubic meters per year). Following treatment, water is routed to one of nine effluent reclamation plants. These plants desalinate the water and/or insert it into the soil for tertiary treatment and to recharge the aquifer, generating 206 million cubic meters of effluent water per year.
- Creating usable water through the desalination of brackish water, seawater and treated wastewater. Mekorot operates 31 reverse osmosis (RO) and electro dialysis (ED) desalination plants throughout Israel with a daily treatment capacity of nearly a million cubic meters. Through an ambitious building program, Mekorot intends to increase desalination production by 2010 to nearly 200 million cubic meters per year, including 100 million cubic meters to be desalinated from sea water, 77 million from brackish water and 13 million from secondary effluents and wastewater.
- Artificial recharge of groundwater at recharge plants located throughout the country, including Shafdan, Shikma, Menashe rivers, Nachshonim and five reservoirs south of the Dead Sea. Artificial recharge of Israel’s Coastal Aquifer serves to restore higher groundwater levels to counteract further intrusion of sea water and to counteract withdrawals.
Mekorot’s advanced automation technologies enable it to reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of managing its water resources. Its systems include:
- A national network of fully-automated control centers. These centers ensure the continuous functioning of Mekorot’s 3,000 water installations, including pumping stations, treatment facilities, reservoirs and pipelines.
- Advanced communications devices that provide online, real-time information about water quality and water supply, while allowing remote control of vital systems.
- Proprietary technologies for maintaining water security throughout the water supply system.
- Proprietary technologies for optimization of energy utilization