By John — Desalination News
Israel’s Water Authority has opened a competitive tender for the construction and operation of a new seawater desalination plant in the Emek Hefer Industrial Zone, near Netanya on the country’s central coastline. Once complete, the facility would rank among the largest desalination plants anywhere in the world, with a planned annual output of roughly 400 million cubic metres — equivalent to about 40% of Israel’s total household and industrial freshwater consumption.
The tender, announced this week, invites private consortiums to bid for a 25-year build-operate-transfer concession spanning a roughly 20-hectare site. Under the public-private partnership (PPP) structure, the winning concessionaire will finance, construct, and then run the plant for the full concession period before eventually transferring it back to the state, a model Israel has used successfully on its existing string of large-scale reverse osmosis (RO) plants along the Mediterranean coast.
Notably, the tender documents leave room for the winning bidder to also build a dedicated natural gas-fired power plant of up to 300 megawatts to supply electricity for the desalination process — an arrangement that would let the facility largely generate its own energy rather than draw purely from the national grid, a meaningful consideration given how energy-intensive large-scale reverse osmosis desalination remains.
Water Authority director Yehezkel Lipshitz described the tender launch as “great news for the water sector and the citizens of Israel,” framing the project as a response to both population growth and the intensifying pressure that climate change is placing on the country’s traditional freshwater sources, including the Sea of Galilee and coastal aquifers. Israel already meets a substantial share of its domestic water demand through desalination, operating five major seawater RO plants along its coast; a sixth large-scale facility of this size would represent a significant further expansion of that capacity.
The project also carries a regional dimension. Officials have linked the Emek Hefer plant to discussions around the “Prosperity Blue” initiative, a proposed water-for-energy exchange under which Israel would supply Jordan with up to 200 million cubic metres of desalinated water annually, in return for renewable electricity generated in Jordan. While Prosperity Blue itself remains at a conceptual and diplomatic stage rather than a signed agreement, added desalination capacity of this scale would give Israel more headroom to consider such regional water-sharing arrangements without straining domestic supply.
No timeline for construction start or plant commissioning has yet been disclosed, and the tender process itself — evaluating bids, selecting a concessionaire, and finalising financing for a project of this scale — is likely to take considerable time. Desalination has become central to Israel’s water strategy over the past two decades, and this tender signals the country intends to keep expanding that capacity well beyond current levels rather than treat existing plants as sufficient for long-term demand.
(Source: JNS)