Tucked away under environmental headings at Reuters.com last Friday was a story and video about a Japanese car that runs on water. Although the idea of a water-powered car has long dwelled in the margins of news reporting (albeit to no avail) the latest effort from Japanese company Genepax offers “real progress” on what has long been a fruitless dream.

Engineering specifications are in short supply for the car, though speculation is not. Genepax itself claims that their Water Energy System(WES) “produces electricity and heat from water,” and uses “on-board WES for continuous battery charging.” Unfortunately, Genepax offers no specifications to set itself apart from previous water-powered attempts (the Energy System, Mechanism, and Development links at their website are under construction). The two-year-old company runs on a reported budget of just under $400,000, with an office in Osaka and Tokyo, but little else is known about them.

Skepticism and doubt weren’t far behind the reports on Friday. Slashdot.org writes, “What’s scary is the uncritical, even serious-sounding, presentation by Reuters of such extraordinary claims quite unbacked by extraordinary evidence.” If energy from water were really possible, argues the writer, not only would the car be a bigger story, but other lines of water-powered products would be not far behind. Indeed technology to replace oil with water would be a very significant finding—worth at least front-page treatment.

However, for all the conversation about Genepax—whether hopeful or doubtful—one question has not yet been raised. Is water dependency really preferable as a long-term solution to oil dependency? Water is in vast abundance on Earth, argue the proponents of Genepax—but water is also needed in a vast variety of functions. Depleting the world’s oil supply would lead to a serious economic crunch and perhaps the decline of modern civilization, but depleting the water supply would lead to the end of life on Earth.