By Ari Rabinovitch
EIN BOKEK, Israel, Aug 12 (Reuters) - The Dead Sea is shrinking at the rate of about a meter a year, leaving behind deserted beaches and sinkholes in a slow-motion environmental disaster.
The main culprit is the drying up of the Jordan river, its main tributary, as communities upstream draw on it for
farming and drinking. But mineral extraction makes the crisis worse - of the 700-800 million cubic meters of water lost each year, 250-350 million cubic meters is due to mining, Israel estimates.
Up to now, the Israeli government has rarely intervened in the operations of the biggest extractor: the Dead Sea Works, formerly state-owned and now operated under a 70-year concession by Israel Chemicals (ICL).
That is about to change.
Israel wants to re-tender the Dead Sea mining concession as much as eight years ahead of schedule, in 2022. It is motivated not only by environmental concerns but also by worries ICL will hold off on new investments in the concession's final years.
The government believes ICL will agree to its proposal, first because the firm will have the right of first refusal but also because it too has a powerful reason to scrap the current concession: an article that gives the government the rights to interfere in investments starting in 2020.
The plant is one of ICL's core assets, producing potash that goes into fertilizers, bromine for flame retardants and other products sold for billions of dollars worldwide.
The company, controlled by billionaire Idan Ofer's Israel Corp, has not made its position clear. It declined to give an immediate comment on its stance when contacted by Reuters.
"This is a one-time opportunity, as the concession comes to an end and we enter a new period, to set standards for the factory's operations and the environmental impact on the whole area," said Galit Cohen, deputy director-general for policy and planning at the Environmental Protection Ministry.
Cohen was on the high-ranking inter-ministerial committee that produced a preliminary report in May with guidelines that aim to balance profits with environmental interests in the Dead Sea for the first time.
At the moment, ICL is largely free to do whatever it wants to maximize production, Cohen said, speaking to Reuters underneath a date tree on a northern beach at the lake.
"They have no incentive to reduce the amount of water they pump or think about from where they get the earth to build their dikes," she said.
The Dead Sea has been popular for millennia for health seekers and tourists who come to float in its high-density waters and smear its mud on their skin. Without intervention, it will keep losing water, essential to the mineral extraction process, though experts believe it may eventually reach equilibrium at a much smaller size.
ICL said in a July 5 letter to the committee that its report raised "complicated legal, economic, operational and engineering issues, and ICL has significant reservations about part of what was said in it".
"The company is studying the report and will relate to it as customary within the framework of the public hearing," ICL said in a statement to Reuters.
In its 2017 annual report, the company said its ability to refinance debt in the next decade "... depends, among other things, on extension of the concession beyond 2030."
SETTING LIMITS
The factory's new license, whose term has not been set, will include pumping limits coupled with financial incentives to use less water, the committee's report said. The amount of territory open to quarrying and drilling for wells will be reduced.
Final recommendations due around September are not expected to differ materially from the interim report's, said a senior
Link pedopil government official, who asked not to be identified given the sensitivity of the issue.
"We think everyone has an interest in making the tender earlier," the official said. "The value of the asset gets lower as we get closer to the end of the concession period and it's unclear what will happen after 2030.
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