Israel's IDE Technologies is accustomed to dealing with difficult situations; its entire raison d'etre is based on the need to bring forth sweet water from that which would otherwise be unusable.
But chief executive Avshalom Felder announced Tuesday that his company has signed a multi-million dollar contract to build a desalination plant in Australia – a deal that he said in a statement was one of the "most challenging" the company has ever received.
The plant will be based on reverse osmosis technology, a modern process used for desalinating water in a wide range of applications.
It will produce 140,000 cubic meters of high quality desalinated process water and drinking water per day (50 million cubic meters per year), according to IDE, most of which will be used by the firm's industrial client for its manufacturing processes.
The contract, worth more than 100 million euros ($149 million) puts IDE in "a key position for competing in similar projects in the future," said Felder.
It also establishes for the company, owned jointly by the Israel Corporation Group subsidiary Israel Chemicals and the Delek Group, a beachhead in Australia where few water technology firms have gone before.
The project is slated for completion sometime in 2010.
Israeli Technology on an International Scale
IDE has used the same technology in the desalination plants in Ashkelon and Hadera, each of which produces more than 100 million cubic meters of water per year, as well as in Cyprus (20 million cubic meters / year) and in Eilat (3.6 million cubic meters / year).
The Israeli firm has become a world leader in water desalination since its establishment in 1965. It specializes in commercial applications of thermal and membrane technologies for desalinating and converting sea and brackish water to drinking and process water.
IDE has more than 385 clients in 40 countries on every continent around the world, altogether producing more than 1,600,000 cubic meters of water per day.