Ancient alchemists thought everything was made of four elements - earth, air, fire, water. For centuries, they tried to turn base metals into gold - and failed.

Modern alchemists tried to use earth, air, fire, and water to turn black tar into gold (oil) - and succeeded. These 21st C. alchemists are Israeli. They are modern-era halutzim (pioneers) who spent years in frigid twenty-below weather in northern Alberta on a mission. The result may in the long run radically dilute the enormous strategic threat Arab oil enjoys, in Israel's and the West's favor. 

In the 1950's, the visionary David Ben Gurion saw that Israel had no oil but lots of sunshine. So he asked Dr. Zvi Tabor, who ran the Israel Physics Lab, to develop solar-powered water heaters. Today Israelis enjoy cheap hot showers as a result. 

A young French-educated new immigrant in the lab, Lucien (Yehuda) Bronicki, was then asked to design a turbine that could make electricity from solar-heated water. His small, tough turbines became the key product of his Yavne-based start-up company, Ormat, today a world leader in  geothermal energy and low-maintenance turbines. Bronicki still runs the company with his wife Dita. They own 27 percent of Ormat Industries Ltd. shares. 

Some experts say tar sands hold up to 6 trillion barrels of the world's oil, half of all the remaining oil in the world, most of it in Alberta and Venezuela. But how do you get fluid gold from stuff that Yoram Bronicki, son of Yehuda and Dita, says "at room temperature, is as fluid as a highway?" 

Ormat sent Yoram, an engineer, to frigid Cold Lake, Alberta, 300 kms. northeast of Edmonton, as the head of a team. Their Mission Impossible task - find a commercially-viable way to produce oil from the Athabasca tar sands, in sub-zero weather. The stakes were high. Canadian tar sands hold proven oil reserves of at least 175 b. barrels, second only to Saudi Arabia's 262 b. barrels, and by itself enough to supply all the world's oil consumption for five whole years.

In Cold Lake and in Yavneh, Israel, Yoram and his team invented OrCrude™, an ingenious three-stage process that uses fire and water (steam), air and earth (tar) to separate and upgrade the 'wheat' (high-grade oil) from the 'chaff' (low-grade bitumen). A pilot plant was built and operated by a team of Israeli ex-soldiers, joined by Canadians. Today a commercial plant is being built.

"What we demonstrated", Yoram explains, "was a less expensive upgrading process that converts as much of the oil as possible into useable liquids and uses the balance as energy to extract the oil from the ground, instead of burning natural gas." In other words: Use some of the tar itself for energy to help turn the rest into fluid oil.  

"Think global, act local," we teach managers. While in Cold Lake, Yoram learned to act local - to skate and to play hockey. What else is there to do during an eight-month winter? Recently he returned to Calgary's Saddle Dome, put on skates and hockey gear and played a few periods.

Ormat formed a joint venture called Opti to fund the project. Opti has done well. After its initial stock offering on the Toronto Stock Exchange in January 2004, its stock price has doubled. Ormat holds 35 percent of Opti's stock. 

Canadian hockey great Wayne Gretzky had an uncanny ability on the ice to be in the right place at the right time. So do Israel's global halutzim. Wherever there are business opportunities in the world, you will find Israelis like Yoram Bronicki on the spot. The new generation of pioneers will continue to make Israel an important global player.