A huge plume of microalgae from Egypt is threatening Israel’s desalination plants and has taken two of them offline completely. Israel has compensated for the decline in desalinated water by increasing pumping from the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) and underground wells.
“It is a high-level challenge, and we haven’t seen an algae bloom like this for 20 or 30 years,” Danny Lacker, head of the water security and emergency division at Israel’s Water Authority, told JNS. “At the same time, we are managing the situation—it is not managing us.”
The algae became trapped in the reverse-osmosis filters, forcing Israel to temporarily close five of its six desalination plants. While individual plants have been closed before, the scale of the current disruption is unusual.
Lacker and other water experts said the quality of Israel’s drinking water remains unaffected and there has been no interruption in the supply of water to Israeli consumers. But they said the situation is a warning that Israel must prepare for future unexpected events.
“It was a ‘perfect storm’ of a series of events,” Clive Lipchin, lead water researcher at the Arava Institute, told JNS. “The high temperatures pushed the algae bloom northward because of the high sea temperatures. The algae may also have been contaminated with sewage from Gaza. It was a number of issues that combined in a unique set of circumstances.”
“There is still no consensus on exactly what happened,” he said. “But it shows that Israel cannot turn a blind eye to what is happening in Gaza. None of the wastewater plants [in Gaza] are working because of the war, and large amounts of sewage are being dumped into the Mediterranean.”
Israel has one of the highest rates of desalination in the world, and according to Lipchin, if Israel had not embarked on its desalination projects, it would have no water today.
Lacker said Israel is coping with the crisis by increasing water supplies from other sources, including the Kinneret, whose water level is already quite low. He said there has been no impact on the domestic sector, but that the government has cut back supplies to some farmers in the south who use fresh water.
About 70% of Israel’s farmers use treated wastewater to grow crops, one of the highest rates in the world.
Lacker said Israel chose to shut down the desalination plants out of concern that the algae could damage some of their components, especially the filters used to remove salt from seawater.
“We are using risk management and seeing how the algae affects the machines,” he said.
Of Israel’s six desalination plants, the Hadera facility has remained online since the crisis began because the algae bloom has not reached that far north. Several of the other plants have been turned on and off for a few hours at a time.
In the end, Lacker said, Israel will have to rely even more heavily on desalination.
“We can’t change the amount of rain that we get,” he said. “But we have to make sure that we have the Sea of Galilee available and that we have the ability to get water from underground wells. We have to focus on how to protect the resources we do have.”
He compared pumping additional water from the Kinneret to going into “overdraft,” as many Israelis do each month with their bank accounts. Israel, he said, must ensure that it can handle that overdraft while expanding its desalination capacity.
