Why can’t we just pipe in saltwater to areas low on water and remove the salt for watering plants, etc?
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It is possible to remove salt from water, it is called desalination. The problem is cost in building the facilities and removing the salt from the water.
The cost is around $0.50 per cubic meter, which might not sound like a lot until you look at the water required to produce food. You need around 1500 liter =1.5 cubic meters of water to make 1kg of wheat and need around 15,000 liters for beef. So growing a kilogram of wheat require around $0.75 of water and $7.50 for a kg of beef. That is a quite significant cost increase.
Water is also heavy and you need a lot of energy to lift it up. We use the potential energy from elevation in hydroelectric power plants So pump it up to a location where there is not a lot of water cost a lot of additional money to power the pumps.
So it is something that technically can be done, the problem is one of cost and a way to get the required energy.
Desalination makes sense economically for human domestic usage not for agriculture.
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