Why is it hard, and costly to remove salt from water?
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The most straightforward way to do it is to boil the water, catch the evaporated water and condense it again to clean water. That leaves the salt residue behind as it doesn’t evaporate with the water.
The difficulty is cost. Boiling water is pretty intensive for energy. Doing it on an industrial scale would require a huge amount of energy that costs a lot.
There’s also the issue of transportation. It’s rare that an area with salt water also has no clean water: typically fresh water runs in to the sea, so if you’re beside the sea you’re almost by default also beside a fresh water supply. So you want to transport the cleaned water elsewhere. Which requires a lot of pipes and pumps. Which are expensive.
There are other ways to clean salt water. They have basically the same issues that trying to scale up & transport is still very expensive/energy intensive.
If you buy a few pipes you can easily rig up something to clean salt water yourself in your house with some pots and a stove. It’s a very simple/easy process that just happens to be expensive and therefore difficult to scale.
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