Israel and Jordan seal water-swap deal

Israel and Jordan have signed a bilateral agreement to exchange water and pipe Red Sea desalination brine to the shrinking Dead Sea.

 

Under the agreement, Jordan and Israel will share the potable water produced by a planned desalination plant in Aqaba. Its waste brines will be piped to the Dead Sea.The agreement involves the construction of a 65-80 million m³ a year desalination plant in Aqaba, Rom which Israel would be able to buy some 35 million m³ a year of potable water to convey to its desert south. In return, Jordan would be able to buy an additional 50 million m³ a year of water from Lake Kinneret, roughly doubling its current allocation.

Signing the agreement on Thursday is National Infrastructure, Energy and Water Minister Silvan Shalom, alongside his Jordanian counterpart, Water and Irrigation Minister Hazim El-Naser.



Advisor to the Israei government, Maya Eldar, said: "This is a real agreement that is going to make sure the cooperation and relationship between Israel and Jordan is going to last."

In addition to water swaps the agreement involves the construction of a 200 km pipeline to carry residual brines from the Aqaba desalination plant to the depleting Dead Sea.



The agreement, was the product of a memorandum of understanding signed in Washington, DC by Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian officials in December 2013.That memorandum of understanding also called for Israel to enable the direct sale of an additional 20 million m³ of water a year from Mekorot national water company to Palestine, but that was being worked on separately according to Eldar.

Clarification: Use of RO Water in Golf Industry Mag Article

I just finished reading an interesting article in Golf Course Industry Magazine, written by Jason Stahl, about the types and uses of golf course irrigation water. In the article, Mr, Stahl refers to comments of Dr. Dara Park, a soil and water specialist with the Clemson University School of Agricultural, Forest and Environmental Sciences. Dr. Park's informative information is very good but an important clarification is necessary regarding Dr. Parks comment about the use of RO water.

Dr. Park does not recommend the use of RO water because it is devoid of any beneficial minerals required by greens and fairways. In my many years of experience designing and supplying RO systems for GC irrigation, I have never seen highly purified RO water applied directly to the turf. Most RO systems are utilized to reduce salinity found in brackish water wells. The RO product water will not be "purified" by rather it will contain about 200 - 350 ppm TDS. This is an excellent water quality for irrigation however it is rare that even this quality water is applied directly to fairways and greens. The product water from Golf Course RO systems is directed either to an irrigation water pond or to storage tanks. Irrigation ponds are the most common. These are the ponds that the irrigation pumping systems draw their supply. The RO water which is nearly devoid of Chlorides, Sodium, and Bicarbonates mixed with the pond water and the TDS increases do to natural organics and other non-harmful substance in the pond water. In a storage tank, the RO water mixes with airborne substances and rain water.

There are GC facilities that use their RO systems to treat municipal water often because the cost to do so is lower for them than buying water from the public utility. The RO product will be very pure but once it is mixed with pond water the TDS increases to a beneficial level. Also, some GC superintendents inject additives into the RO product to meet particular growth objectives.

In conclusion, wherever a consistent supply of low cost good quality water is not present, RO systems are an excellent tool for creating irrigation quality water from otherwise unusable alternative water supplies.

Fresh Water From Clean Energy

Investment Opportunity: Through our ‘Essential Utilties’ Consortium we now offer a very unique package to world markets. Our system integrators have combined Aeronautica Windpower’s 225 and 750kW wind turbines with our Reverse Osmosis water desalinization plants. This combined system is perfect for island communities, developing markets, or high energy cost regions, and is pre-engineered to work together as a combined system in modular configurations. Using a proprietary technology that makes extra fresh water when the winds are blowing, our system uses water storage like a ‘battery’ to store the wind’s power - in the form of fresh water. Our system then prioritizes how the available wind energy can be used in running transfer and intake pumps in order to maximize savings. When no wind is available, the system instantly switches to grid power or an on-site generator. If excess wind power is still available after making extra fresh water, we put it back on the grid. Through AWD and our International Development Partners, we can offer Design/Build services only, or a complete, Turnkey operation that sells you water and excess power under water purchase agreements. We can provide a full range of services, including permitting, design, construction, financing and operations, maintenance and management functions.                                                              

Configurations Available in Modules of:

750 kW Wind/1,500m3/day Water

1,500 kW Wind/3,000m3/day Water

2,250 mW Wind/4,500 m3

Investment in the construction of new water supply and treatment infrastructure in emerging economies will become a dominant theme over the next decade.

 For more information E-Mail to jeff@wtsro.com.

WTS Desalination Plant Powered by Wind Turbines

WTS, Inc.has proposed a new fresh water production facility for an Island population off the coast of Africa.  The plant will be housed in a number of 40’ shipping containers to produce 4,500m3 of fresh water daily.  The plant will be powered by its own 750kW wind generator and backup thermal (diesel/bio diesel) generator, and tied to the island’s existing electrical grid for redundancy and continual operation for consistent supply of fresh water.  This arrangement of the desalinization plant, combined with its wind and thermal power plants, has been specifically sized in order to create a ‘modular’ configuration which can be duplicated in other areas of the country.  By using this modular approach WTS, Inc. can provide great economies for the islands in terms of scale and redundancy of design, inter-interoperability across multiple plants, cross-training of operating personnel and the supply of spare parts for immediate repairs.  The integral design also allows fresh water production to be increased during times of excess wind energy and stored, thus acting as a cost effective ‘battery’ for the wind energy.

RO Zero Liquid Discharge at Texas Golf Club

Water Treatment Systems, Inc designed and built a 1,000,000 GPD reverse osmosis based water treatment plant that will feature (nearly) "Zero Liquid Discharge" of the waste water concentrate from the RO systems. RO concentrate water that is to be discharged to a sewer system has been reduced to only approximately 28,000 GPD. That is a design recovery of greater than 97%. This is a very important development for the RO and also for the Golf industries.In many parts of the country, and indeed worldwide, golf course managers struggle with the problems of availability, cost or quality of water for irrigation of their golf course. "Reverse Osmosis has solved the problem of utilizing brackish ground water and many Golf Clubs have planned to purchase and install their own RO water treatment plants only to run directly into a very major obstacle. The problem is finding a suitable location to send the RO concentrate water and obtaining the necessary permits. RO concentrate water is considered 'industrial waste' by the DER and EPA." The lower the amount of RO concentrate, the smaller the problem is. Reverse Osmosis systems are currently desalinating brackish or sea water at dozens of gold course facilities in the USA and world-wide. The product water from RO systems is very good "irrigation" quality. These facilities discharge their concentrate water, usually about 25% of the feed water, to an appropriate and permittable location. For a one million gallon per day RO system, this can be 250,000 gallons per day. A great many golf course facilities that need to treat their available water do not have an approved location to discharge it to. The original design for the Texas Golf Course called for total liquid discharge with the use of evaporators as the final treatment phase. Evaporators are expensive both in capital and operating cost. But our client was fortunate to obtain permitting for approximately 5% of the concentrate thus eliminating the evaporation phase which saved about a million dollars". The WTS (nearly) zero liquid discharge design using membrane systems is a low cost opportunity for golf clubs everywhere.

Hackers 'hit' US water treatment systems

The alleged attack was made on a system that piped clean water to homes in Illinois.

Hackers are alleged to have destroyed a pump used to pipe water to thousands of homes in a US city in Illinois.

Hackers with access to the utility's network are thought to have broken the pump by turning it on and off quickly.

The FBI and Department for Homeland Security (DHS) are investigating the incident as details emerge of what could be a separate second attack.

Experts said the news revealed a growing interest in critical infrastructure by cyber criminals.

Information about the 8 November incident came to light via the blog of Joe Weiss who advises utilities on how to protect hardware against attack.

Mr Weiss quoted from a short report by the Illinois Statewide Terrorism and Intelligence Center which said hackers obtained access using stolen login names and passwords. These were taken from a company which writes control software for industrial systems.

The net address through which the attack was carried out was traced to Russia, according to Mr Weiss. The report said "glitches" in the remote access system for the pump had been noticed for months before the burn out, said Mr Weiss.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Iran's nuclear programme has been slowed by a virus targeting industrial control systems

Peter Boogaard, A spokesman for the DHS, said it was gathering facts about the incident.

"At this time there is no credible corroborated data that indicates a risk to critical infrastructure entities or a threat to public safety," he said.
Industrial action

The comments by the DHS prompted a hacker using the handle "pr0f" to claim he had access to the control systems for a second US water utility.

He posted a document to the Pastebin website which purportedly contained links to screenshots of the internal control systems for a waste water treatment plant in South Houston.

The hacker's claims about their ability to penetrate the control systems have yet to be confirmed or denied by South Houston's Water and Sewer Department.

In an interview with the Threat Post website, Pr0f said the hack of the South Houston network barely deserved the name because only a three-character password had been used to protect the system.

The attacks are the latest in a series in which different hackers and groups have targeted so called Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. These specialised computer systems are used to control equipment used to filter water, mix chemicals, distribute power and route trains and trams.

One of the best known SCADA attacks involved the Stuxnet worm which caused problems for Iran.

There were reports that the malware crippled centrifuges used in the nation's uranium enrichment program. Iran denied the claims saying that it had caught the worm before it reached its intended target.

Earlier this year, security researchers who investigated ways to attack SCADA systems were persuaded to cancel a public talk about their findings because of the "serious physical, financial impact these issues could have on a worldwide basis".

Lani Kass, a former adviser to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff on security issues, said America had to start doing more work to understand attacks on critical infrastructure.

"The going in hypothesis is always that it's just an incident or coincidence," she said. "And if every incident is seen in isolation, it's hard - if not impossible - to discern a pattern or connect the dots."

"Failure to connect the dots led us to be surprised on 9/11," she said.

Investing In Water ETFs

Supply and demand forces dictate that the global water sector will witness growth and positive price support in the future, making the PowerShares Water Resources (PHO), the PowerShares Global Water (PIO) and the Guggenheim S&P Global Water Index (CGW) attractive investments. According to the World Resources Institute, consumption of water has been growing more than twice as fast as population growth. Demand for the essential commodity is expected to increase by more than 50% over the next 15 years in developing markets and by more than 15% in developed markets like the US. This demand in developing nations is emerging as incomes are rising and people are moving out of rural areas into more developed parts of their countries. In fact, a report by the United Nations indicates that nearly 50% of the world’s population currently lives in cities, and over the next 35 years, this number is expected to rise to more than two-thirds. Most recently, the world’s population broke the 7 billion mark and it expected to surpass the 9 billion mark within the next 40 years. Much of this growth has been, and will likely continue to be, witnessed in the developing nations of Africa and Asia. On the supply side, water scarcity and water stress has already prevailed in parts of Russia, China, and the US. Furthermore, the expected impact of Mother Nature’s doing -- more severe flooding and droughts -- is expected to curtail the supply of potable water. The world has a large amount of water; however, only 2.5% of it is fresh water, and a mere 33% of this fresh water can be used for agricultural purposes and human consumption. At the end of the day, a supply and demand imbalance in the most important commodity around the world prevails and is likely to continue to do so, setting the stage for an influx in investment into the sector on both the domestic and international stage.