An evaluation of marginal waters as a natural resource in Israel

Abstract

The scarcity of water in Israel and its possible effect on the socioeconomic development of the country have evinced considerable interest in the utilization of marginal waters. A nonlinear mathematical model was formulated, whose dual solution has shown that urban waste water and brackish water have substantial values ranging up to 65% of the cost of imported freshwater. The nonlinear production function in the mathematical model permitted the detailed analysis of the impact of the economies of scale on the primal and dual solutions. The optimal allocation of water for the Central Negev in 1992 calls for 40% of the forecast total water demand to be supplied by 26 million m3 of treated urban waste water and brackish water.

Comment on ‘An evaluation of marginal waters as a natural resource in Israel’ by N. Buras and P. Darr

“…In their paper on the use of marginal water in Israel Buras and Darr [ 1979] present an optimization model as a way of developing a general set of criteria establishing trade-offs or substitution levels between water differing in both quality and spatial distribution. This is an admirable goal and follows on a similar attempt by Bishop et al [1975], in which a linear transportation optimization model was proposed and the dual variables corresponding to demand constraints analyzed to show implied prices.…”