IDE Technologies Brand Guidelines: Kadima’s Desalination Engineers, From Hadera to Carlsbad

An engineer, a coastline and a shortage of fresh water.

IDE Technologies is an Israeli company that designs, builds and runs plants that turn seawater and wastewater into usable water. English Wikipedia gives its founding year as 1965 and its founder as Alexander Zarchin, a Ukrainian-born engineer, and places its headquarters in Kadima, in central Israel. The business daily Globes, reporting in December 2017, described the company as founded fifty years earlier, which fits that date; the company’s own website now speaks of “over 60 years” in the water industry.

The company says it works in both of the main families of desalination: thermal plants, which evaporate seawater and condense the vapour, and membrane plants, which push seawater through reverse-osmosis membranes. It describes itself as specialising in “the development, engineering, construction, and operation” of desalination and industrial water treatment plants.

For most of its modern history IDE had two owners. Until 2017 it was held in equal shares by Israel Chemicals and Delek Group, Globes reported. In December 2017 Israel Chemicals completed the sale of its half to a group made up of Clal Insurance, the advanced training fund of the Teachers Union and IDE’s then president and chief executive, Avshalom Felber; Globes gave their shares as 20, 20 and 10 percent of the company.

Delek Group’s half followed in stages. In March 2020 Globes reported that Delek was selling its remaining 20 percent holding to Alfa Water Partners, the investor group led by Felber and Amir Lang, a former executive vice president of Delek Group, and that Alfa Water had already bought 30 percent of IDE from Delek the year before.

Ashkelon, Hadera, Sorek and Carlsbad.

IDE’s reputation rests on large coastal plants. English Wikipedia lists the plants it built in Israel at Hadera, Ashkelon and Soreq, and Globes reported in 2017 that the company owned half of the Ashkelon and Hadera plants and 51 percent of the Soreq plant, as well as the whole of the plant it built in 2015 at Carlsbad, California. Wikipedia says IDE agreed in 2013 to design the Carlsbad plant, and that the work was finished in December 2015, ahead of the original 2016 date, as California’s drought continued.

The company’s reach is wider than those four names. Globes wrote in 2017 that IDE had carried out more than 400 projects in 40 countries, among them India, China, Australia and Thailand, and the company gives the same figures today. Wikipedia mentions further projects in India, Chile and Mexico.

In March 2025 the company announced that Sorek 2 – Be’er Miriam, a seawater reverse-osmosis plant on the Israeli coast, was supplying water to the national system. IDE calls it the world’s first steam-driven seawater reverse-osmosis plant, with high-pressure pumps driven by steam from its own power station, and says it was shortlisted for the 2025 Global Water Award for Desalination Plant of the Year; those are the company’s own descriptions.

Beyond municipal water, IDE sells brine-management systems under the MAXH2O name and works for power stations, refineries, mines and semiconductor plants, according to its website. It credits its engineers with ideas such as a pressure-centre layout for reverse-osmosis plants, the cleaning of membranes without stopping a production train, and 16-inch membranes arranged vertically, and says it holds more than 90 granted and pending patents.

The company lists its awards prominently: the Global Water Intelligence prizes for Desalination Company of the Year and for the Carlsbad plant as Desalination Plant of the Year, a 2020 Wastewater Project of the Year award for the Koyambedu tertiary treatment reverse-osmosis plant, and a place on Fortune’s 2016 “Change the World” list. We give these as the company presents them.

Plants, membranes and trade fairs.

Desalination and industrial water companies sell things that few people ever see up close. Their customers are utilities, governments, refineries, mines and factories, and what they buy is rarely a boxed product: it is a plant, a process, a long operating contract or a membrane that will sit inside a pressure vessel for years. That shapes how these companies present themselves.

The plant is usually the hero. Company websites and annual reports in this field tend to lead with aerial photographs of coastal desalination works, with intake pipes running out to sea and long halls beside the shore. Inside, the familiar image is a row of white or grey pressure vessels holding reverse-osmosis membranes, stacked rack upon rack, or the polished casings of pumps and pressure exchangers that recover energy from the brine stream. Engineers in hard hats and high-visibility jackets on site, checking a control screen or walking a pipe gallery, give the pictures a human scale.

The vocabulary is technical and often trademarked. Membranes, energy-recovery devices and treatment processes carry their own names, and companies list reference plants, countries and project counts the way consumer brands list stockists. Awards from the water trade press and industry bodies are often displayed prominently.

The industry also meets in person. Trade fairs such as IFAT in Munich and Singapore International Water Week bring utilities, contractors and equipment makers to the same halls, and the stands there, with their models, membrane cut-aways and video walls, are one of the few places where these brands show themselves to each other. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company and marks what rests on its own word.

Owned by its managers’ partnership.

Today the company says IDE Technologies Group is fully owned by Alfa Water Partners, a partnership founded by Felber and Lang. Its website describes the partnership’s other backers as Israeli institutional investors, among them insurers and pension and training funds, alongside two private companies owned by the two founders. Felber, who had been president and chief executive from 2002, became executive chairman in 2018, the company says; its chief executive is Alon Tavor.

The group now presents itself through several names. Its website and press releases use IDE Technologies Group for the whole, IDE Water Technologies for the business that designs and builds plants, and IDE Water Assets for a business based in the United States; the Sorek 2 announcement went out under the IDE Water Technologies name. Its pages describe work across municipal desalination, water reuse and industrial treatment.

The way IDE talks about itself is consistent. Its “About” page leads with its track record of plants and countries, its engineering and research teams, its patents and the awards its plants have won, and it calls itself “a world leader in water treatment solutions”; the claim is the company’s own.

The ownership story is also part of its identity. For half a century IDE sat inside two of Israel’s largest industrial groups; after the sales of 2017 to 2020 reported by Globes, it belongs to a partnership led by two of its own executives, with Israeli institutional investors behind them.

For a design guide, IDE Technologies shows how an engineering contractor builds a brand from its plants, its patents and its awards rather than from a consumer product. Compare Suez, another long-standing name in water engineering, and Energy Recovery, whose pressure exchangers are used in reverse-osmosis plants. For this guide we use a deep sea blue, a teal and a pale sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep IDE Technologies’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.