There is energy stored in the electron shells of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, like the tension in a coiled spring. When these elements combine chemically to form water (what we call "burning") this energy is released as light and heat. (The spring uncoils.) The water that is left has used up that chemical energy, it went into the fire and light of the burning. There is no more chemical energy left in that water. In fact, if you want to break up the water back into hydrogen and oxygen, you have to ADD electrical energy from a battery to compress those springs again and force those atoms apart. This is easy to do, but it COSTS energy to do this, it doesn't YIELD any.

The "scientific" explanation given by the company rep is gibberish, like the kind of blather Scotty used to give Kirk about the dilithium crystals. It's just words that don't mean anything. It would have made more sense if he had said there is a magician in the box creating energy by using magic spells.

OK. So I have a closed mind and can't think out of the box because of my unimaginative scientific indoctrination. Let's follow that line of reasoning and see where it leads us... Let's suppose this is a demonstration of some new scientific process that hasn't been discovered yet, that some clever Japanese researcher has come up with
something that is light years ahead of modern chemistry and physics. It would be a fundamental scientific breakthrough, like atomic energy. After all, we can't rule this out, it has happened before, right?

This new process would revolutionize not only the world and current engineering, it would be a new scientific principle, it would change everything. I would make the oceans a reservoir of energy comparable to the Middle East Oil Patch on a per-gallon basis. The world would change overnight, and the controllers of this process would be able to buy the oil companies. In fact, they could onw the world. It would be an invention to change the planet as much as the steam engine did 200 years ago. Do you really think such a revolutionary technology would only be used to power commuter vehicles? Or introduced to the world like that by some two-bit Osaka engineering firm? If this were true, Japan would no longer need to import oil, it would overnight become the most powerful and richest industrial nation on earth. Not only compact cars, but ships and aircraft would employ this power source, a military based on this technology would be invincible, and cheap to operate. Suddenly we could distill water cheaply on a mass scale and pump it into every desert in the world and grow all the food we could possibly use. The Arabs would forget about their oil and start growing dates in the wadis. People in Florida could wash their cars and water their lawns again!

And no, the oil companies would not cover up this invention and hide it to maintain an energy monopoly. If they could, the'y'd steal it and make a fortune off of it. But I doubt even that. The military and industrial potential of this invention would make it top priority for every government and corporation on the planet. It would not be a means of letting us keep our SUVs. It would be a little more important than the solution of a suburban motorist's inconvenience.

The idea that this preposterous fable could make it past the fact-checkers at a reputable news agency is astonishing to me. To not know how completely implausible this story is at a scientific and politico/economic level reveals an embarassing level of ignorance. It would be like a reporter not knowing the difference between Congress and Senate, or between a Republican and a Democrat. The Law of Conservation of Energy is not abstract physics, this is something every 10th grader should know. It's something every 10th grader used to know. It's as fundamental as a knowledge of long division or the ability to multiply two fractions together.