My mother's heart must have skipped a beat when I told her I was on the 52^nd floor of the World Trade Center yesterday. But after I explained that I was in New York City's first green office tower, rebuilt from the ashes of 9/11, her voice shifted from worry to interest.

On September 11, just north of Ground Zero, 7 World Trade Center crumbled from the intense heat of that day's terrorist attacks and the fiery debris hurled at it from the Twin Towers, just a few hundred feet away.

The rebuilt 7 WTC, completed in 2006, stands 741 feet above the chasm that still remains at the site of the direct impact. It was there that I heard Israeli and American energy entrepreneurs put forth their vision for a new energy future for New York City, with 7 WTC as a linchpin.

You see, 7 WTC is a lesson learned. Larry Silverstein, who developed the new 7 WTC, addressed our gathering at the NY-Israel Alternative and Renewable Energy and Cleantech Conference. When he took on the challenge of rebuilding the heavily symbolic disaster site, the silver-haired Silverstein decided to build something "not only state of the art in structural integrity, but also embracing the latest in environmentally sensitive technology."

That's why 7 WTC has LEED gold certification, with fully modern water, air and lighting systems that save energy while delivering operating cost savings to tenants.

On the empty 52^nd floor, light poured in from all sides of the building though it was a hazy summer day, and I listened to Israel's "water guru," Booky Oren, talk about the most pressing energy crisis in the world.

How do oil companies hope to get oil from deeper and deeper traps under the earth's surface? They're pumping millions of gallons of water into drill holes to get them to gush again.

What is the only non-renewable component of biofuel? Not seed, not sun . . .

And what consumes more than 8% of American energy without our even realizing it, according to the U.S. Department of Energy?

Water is the answer, and the question.

Mr. Oren has 23 years of management experience, and has served as the head of Mekorot, Israel's National Water Company and the only "startup friendly utility" in the country, according to many of my contacts. This stands in stark contrast to Hevrat haHashmal, the national electricity provider, which is bearish on individual generation projects.

Maybe that's why the transition from public to private management has been easy for Oren. Since November of last year, he has served as president and CEO of the Arison Water Initiative, a water-focused holding company with initial capital of $100 million.

Oren's goal with the Arison Group (which has over $1 billion in all of its investment branches) is to turn Israel into the world's "Silicon Valley of water technology." In ten years, water technology should be Israel's number-two export market.

The country certainly has the credentials. Instead of highly inefficient pivot-point irrigation systems, those green circles that dot arid plains throughout much of the United States, Israel developed the world's first drip irrigation systems.

Israeli companies like Netafim, whose VP of Biofuel Energy I met this March at the Biofuels Americas conference in Cartagena, Colombia, are busy traversing the world and selling their home-grown technology around the globe. In the age of bioethanol and biodiesel, water conservation comes along with crop cultivation as a primary concern.

"Water is the next energy crisis . . . and a wonderful business opportunity," Oren continued. This is true not only in agricultural applications but in cities and countries where getting water to citizens for household use is itself a major sore spot.

In Chicago, for example, some 60% of the water that courses through the Windy City's aqueducts is lost to leakage. That is pathetic. What is more pathetic is the general reluctance of governments to shell out the dough to let their people drink safely. On the shores of Lake Michigan, perhaps, freshwater abundance leads to complacency.

Israel has never had the chance to take H₂O for granted. With only one source of fresh water, the Sea of Galilee (called Lake Kinneret in Israel), the country gets much of its water from the Mediterranean. In the coastal cities of Ashkelon and Hadera, Israel has the world's largest reverse-osmosis desalinization plants.

Just a couple of hours away, near the Dead Sea, the groundwater is so mineral-laden that solar water heaters have to be replaced every five years. The residents of the Arava Valley close to the Dead Sea are therefore exempt from the government requirement that every home use solar heat, despite having 360 sunny days a year.

Factors like mineral content make the water market very complex, but also very profitable for those who find proper solutions that can be localized and scaled to meet the needs of the potential market--which is all of humanity.

At the conference in Eilat two weeks ago, scientists talked about power co-generation from the desalinization process, using the fumes of water purification to generate electricity. General Electric head Jeffrey Immelt told his company's annual meeting in 2006 that GE's revenue from water purification and treatment would double by 2010, to $5 billion.

The Persian Gulf, awash with oil revenues as crude surges on Peak Oil panic, is not exactly swimming in fresh water. But they have the money to invest today so they don't get parched tomorrow.

The residents of Amman, Jordan--the capital city with a third of the country's residents--get much of their water from Israel's Galilee. It's a good thing the countries have had a peace agreement since 1994. If Saudi Arabia needs water and Israel knows how to get it, will dry throats lead to a pragmatic agreement in the near term?

We'll see what happens politically, but from a market point of view it is clear that water technology is locked in a worldwide secular bull trend.

Regards,

Sam Hopkins

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