Energy From Seawater - Myth or Legend?

The idea, articulated with varying degrees of vagueness in news reports when they bother to think about such things at all, is that the field is somehow dissociating water into oxygen and hydrogen. Why salt should be essential to this process is far from obvious. You might think that someone would raise that question.

But no one does. No one raises any questions at all. The reports offer a testament to the awesome lack of enquiry and critical thought that makes news media everywhere quite terrifyingly defenceless against bogus science.

And it's not just the news media. There is footage of labs and people in white coats and engineers testifying how amazing the result is, and no one seems to be wondering about how this amazing phenomenon works. As a rule, it is always wise to be sceptical of people claiming great breakthroughs without the slightest indication of any intellectual curiosity on their part.

But 'energy for free' enthusiasts
don't want to know about thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is a killjoy.
Thermodynamics is like big government or big industry, always out to
squash innovation. Thermodynamics is the enemy of the Edisonian spirit
of the backyard inventor.

Here, however (for what it is worth)
is the definitive verdict of thermodynamics: water is not a fuel. It
never has been one, and it never will be one. Water does not burn.
Water is already burnt — it is spent fuel. It is exhaust.

Oh, it feels better to have said
that, but I don't imagine for a moment that it will end these claims of
'water as fuel'. Why not? Because water is a mythical substance.
Kanzius's characterization of water as an 'element' attests to that:
yes, water is of course not a chemical element, but it will
never shake off its Aristotelian persona, because Aristotle's four
classical elements (earth, air, fire and water) accord so closely with
our experiential relationship with matter.

And then there is poor Stanley Meyer, inventor of the 'water-powered car'. Meyer just wanted to give people cheap, clean energy....In 1996 he was found guilty of
"gross and egregious fraud" by an Ohio court. He died in 1998 after
eating at a restaurant; the coroner diagnosed an aneurysm, but the
conspiracy web still suspects he was poisoned [by oil companies]...

...It's not easy to establish how
Meyer's car was meant to work, except that it involved a fuel cell that
was able to split water using less energy than was released by
recombination of the elements. Dig a little deeper and you will
soon find the legendary Brown's gas — a modern chemical unicorn to
rival phlogistion — in which hydrogen and oxygen are combined in a
non-aqueous state called 'oxyhydrogen', in the same proportions in
which they are found in water (2:1). Brown's gas was allegedly used as
a vehicle fuel by its discoverer, Australian inventor Yull Brown.