Why is it so difficult to make water drinkable from the salty oceans?
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The water and salt is sort of chemically bonded to each other. Not through regular covalent bonds but through ionic bonds using Van Der Waals forces. But the principle is the same. You need to break apart these bonds which require energy. There are a few ways to do this but they all require quite a bit of energy in order to brake these bonds to get the salt out of the water.
There are a number of desalination plants around the world providing clean drinking water to coastal areas. But they all suffer from the issue of requiring huge amounts of energy which means the water they make is quite expensive. If drinking water is available even hundreds of miles away it is cheaper to build and operate an aqueduct then a desalination plant.
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