Even though the water is saline, to the best of my understanding, you can convert saltwater into freshwater so why is there a water crisis?
In: Biology
Desalination requires a lot of power. Unfortunately, the world is going through an energy crisis as well. We are trying to cut down on our power consumption to reduce our dependency of fossil fuels. Opening up several more desalination plants would run counter to the strategy of cutting down on energy.
Also, desalinization plants would work well in coastal cities, but inland location would still have a problem. You would have to find a way to deliver water inland, which would cost more energy.
Desalination would also be very expensive.
It’s expensive to remove the salt and it has to be purified, and not everyone lives by the ocean so it has to be transported.
Desalination is expensive and difficult. The biggest uses of water are not individual consumption, but mass or industrial use (i.e. agriculture, bottling, factory usage, etc.) That’s before factoring in things like transporting that water after you’ve desalinated it, not to mention the places facing water shortage are also usually facing a host of other problems that would make desalination an unfeasible solution in the first place.
If human beings operated rationally, then yes, desalination should be an easy way to resolve water shortages…but most likely, we wouldn’t be *having* water shortages in the first place if humans behaved rationally. But we don’t, we behave selfishly, and most of the water crisis only exists in the first place due to global warming (a result of unchecked greed, industrialization, etc.)
**tl;dr** The water crisis is only minimally about the *amount* of freshwater in the world. Mostly, it’s about the difficulties of transporting water, and profits/global classism and climate change.
Because they can be costy.
Although there is a way that you can desaline water by using sunlight (which I suppose is *kinda free*)to evaporate the water, you might need either a lot of time or a wide area to produce considerable ammount of fresh water for public consumption, maybe both.
[Tampa](https://www.tampabaywater.org/tampa-bay-seawater-desalination) uses a desalination plant to supplement the water that’s supplied to the area. I don’t have a link as a source, but I was living in Florida at the time and recall that one of the news outlets mentioned that one reason they set it up this way was the desalination process in use didn’t remove 100% of the salt. Mixing it with other freshwater negated the need to spend more energy extracting additional salt.
The world isn’t suffering from a water shortage. Certain areas are suffering from local shortages of clean freshwater due to rapid population growth both polluting and draining the natural aquifers more rapidly than nature replenishes them.
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