Israel’s water industry is attracting funds from General Electric and ConocoPhillips as the country develops energy-saving technology to treat sewage, part of a $5 billion program to clean up water supplies by 2016.
Emefcy Ltd., building a fuel cell that uses bacteria to break down waste in water, has raised more than $10 million from investors including GE, NRG Energy and ConocoPhillips, its chief executive Eytan Levy said in a telephone interview. The process reduces the amount of energy required to treat sewage and generates electricity.
“We’ve seen a significant increase in interest in resource recovery from wastewater that wasn’t there just a few years ago,” Levy said from Caesarea, Israel. The company is targeting sales in Europe and the United States and forecasts annual revenue of more than $100 million by 2017, he said.
The bacteria project is a small part of Israel’s effort to alleviate a water shortage without straining limited energy supplies. The country’s dry climate and lack of desalination capacity put it at the forefront of a global increase in water scarcity, which the United Nations says will extend to 30 countries by 2025, a gain of more than 50 percent from 1990.
In June, Fairfield, Conn.-based GE opened a research-and-development center in Haifa, Israel, and invested in Emefcy through Energy Technology Ventures, a joint venture with NRG Energy and ConocoPhillips.
“It’s important for us to make sure that we’ve got the right technologies,” Steve Kloos, advanced-technologies leader at GE Power & Water, said by phone from Minnetonka, Minn.
