IDE and the Desalination Stack
IDE Technologies and the network of Israeli seawater reverse-osmosis plants are the working example of climate-adaptation infrastructure delivered at national scale. The operating economics are now well-evidenced.
Water Technology · Israel · Updated June 28, 2026
IDE Technologies is the Israeli desalination company that built the engineering stack on which Israel runs. Israel produces approximately 80% of its drinking water from desalination — the highest share of any country at scale globally. The structural architecture that produced this position runs through five seawater reverse-osmosis (SWRO) plants on the Mediterranean coast, IDE's engineering and operating role across most of them, and a national-water policy framework that no other country has yet replicated.
The Company
IDE Technologies was founded in 1965 in Israel under the name Israel Desalination Engineering. The company developed the thermal-desalination technology base that Israel exported across the Gulf during the 1970s and 1980s. The corporate ownership structure ran through Israel Corporation and Delek Group across the modern era, with the two Israeli holding companies as joint controlling shareholders.
In 2021 the controlling shareholders sold IDE Technologies to Brookfield Asset Management in a transaction valued at approximately $700 million. The transaction transferred the Israeli desalination engineering franchise into the Canadian infrastructure investor's global utilities portfolio. The Israeli engineering and operating organization remained in place — Brookfield treated the acquisition as the addition of a strategic infrastructure operator to its global portfolio rather than a financial-engineering transaction.
The Israeli Desalination Stack
Israel operates five large-scale SWRO desalination plants on the Mediterranean coast. Hadera, opened in 2009, capacity 127 million cubic metres per year. Sorek I, opened in 2013, capacity 150 million cubic metres per year (at opening the largest SWRO plant in the world). Ashkelon, opened in 2005, capacity 118 million cubic metres per year. Palmachim, opened in 2007, capacity 90 million cubic metres per year. Sorek II, commissioned 2023, capacity 200 million cubic metres per year (currently the largest SWRO plant globally).
The aggregate capacity of the five plants is approximately 685 million cubic metres per year. The plants together produce approximately 80% of Israeli household drinking water and a substantial share of industrial water demand. The architecture is the structural foundation of Israeli water security.
IDE Technologies engineered four of the five plants (Hadera, Sorek I, Sorek II, Ashkelon) and operates several of them under BOT (build-operate-transfer) or BOOT (build-own-operate-transfer) concession structures. The depth of IDE's operational role across the Israeli stack is unusual for a single national engineering franchise.
The SWRO Technology
Seawater reverse osmosis is the dominant modern desalination technology globally. The process passes seawater under high pressure through semi-permeable membranes that block dissolved salts, producing potable water on the permeate side and concentrated brine on the reject side. The technology has progressively displaced the thermal-desalination architecture (multi-stage flash, multi-effect distillation) that dominated Gulf desalination through the 1970s and 1980s.
The IDE position in SWRO sits at the engineering level — plant design, membrane selection, energy recovery, brine management, integration with the national water grid. The membrane suppliers (Dow FilmTec, Toray, Hydranautics) operate globally as the equipment-level players. IDE operates as the system integrator and operator.
The energy intensity of SWRO has declined progressively across the past two decades as energy-recovery devices and pressure-exchange architectures have matured. Current best-in-class SWRO plants operate at approximately 3 kWh per cubic metre — substantially lower than the historical norms that made desalination economically marginal.
The Cost Position
Israeli desalinated water delivered to the national water grid runs at approximately $0.50–0.60 per cubic metre at the plant gate under current operational economics. The cost position is competitive with conventional water sources on a marginal basis in the Israeli context. Desalination is now structurally cheaper than the alternative of importing water or restricting consumption to historical natural-source availability.
The Israeli cost position is among the lowest globally for SWRO. The structural reasons include plant scale, technology maturity, the Israeli electricity-pricing environment, and the operational learning curve that IDE and its competitors have built across the multi-plant programme.
The International Expansion
IDE Technologies operates desalination plants and engineering projects across multiple international jurisdictions. The largest non-Israeli IDE projects include the Carlsbad plant in California (50 million gallons per day, the largest SWRO plant in the United States), plants in Australia (Sydney, Adelaide), plants in China, and plants across the broader Mediterranean basin.
The Brookfield acquisition was structured in part to support IDE's international expansion. The Brookfield global infrastructure portfolio includes adjacent water-utility positions across multiple jurisdictions where IDE engineering capability is commercially valuable. The combined entity has structural advantages over stand-alone competitors in international tender environments.
The Gulf Market
The Gulf desalination market — Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar — is the largest desalination market globally by capacity. Historical political constraints prevented direct Israeli engineering involvement in Gulf desalination programmes through the pre-Abraham Accords period. The post-2020 normalization environment opened the question of whether IDE could enter the Gulf market commercially.
The Abraham Accords-era commercial relationships have produced incremental Israeli-Gulf engineering collaboration but have not yet produced large-scale IDE participation in Gulf desalination programmes. The Gulf engineering market remains dominated by established Korean, Japanese, and European EPC contractors. The structural barrier is partially political, partially commercial.
The Climate-Water Argument
The Israeli desalination architecture is, in policy terms, one of the structural answers to the climate-change question in semi-arid Mediterranean regions. Israel demonstrated that a country with limited natural water resources can achieve effective water security through desalination at acceptable economic and environmental costs.
The model is being studied across the Mediterranean basin, the Australian dry-zone, the U.S. Southwest, and the Gulf. The Israeli architecture is not directly replicable — the specific national-water-grid integration depends on geography that other countries do not have — but the technology stack and operational model are exportable.
What 2026 Tracks
Three threads matter. First, the next-generation Israeli desalination capacity decisions — whether additional plants are commissioned beyond Sorek II to support Israeli demand growth and the export-to-Jordan-and-PA water-supply commitments. Second, the IDE international expansion under Brookfield ownership and the pace of international project wins. Third, the technology-architecture evolution — whether membrane efficiency gains, brine-management innovations, and energy-source integration (solar coupling, in particular) reshape the cost structure further.
IDE is the operating Israeli desalination franchise. Israel is the global reference case for desalination at national scale. The architecture continues.
Olam coverage
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