Well on the face of it, it seems implausible, but so many things that are done nowadays seem implausible until you see it actually done. The debunking video I saw was over simplistic and also made several mistakes (e.g. saying the ground is only cooler than the air in summer which is false, at a shallow depth, it’s cooler than the air in desert regions every day and warmer at night).

So I’ve searched for something more reliable than that, and it was covered in rather more depth in Popular mechanics here This device may pull water out of thin air, but not as well as we hoped

So - just to summarize what they say, their prototype was able to pull 300 milliliters of water out of the air in an hour in the daytime. They got their 14 liters per day by generalizing from that and scaling up.

But - according to that article anyway, which cites Kenneth Kroenlein who is an expert on thermodynamics - there are two main problems with this

• The ground is cooler than the air in the daytime, but not at night
• The areas most affected by drought often have humidity much less than 100% which reduces the amount that can be extracted.

The basic idea seems to work after a fashion.

Also the statistics in the video are misleading because most people who don’t have enough clean water live in places where there is plenty of water in the environment, but the problem is accessing clean water. There may be easier ways to get clean water than extracting it from the air in a situation like that. But they suggest it could potentially be useful in places like Mozambique where the air is high humidity and it’s hard to access clean water, and families have to walk for miles to collect it - but the water might still have to be filtered after collecting it from the air to remove pollutants. The advantage would be that you don’t need the infrastructure to transport the clean water where it is needed..

Another thing they mention there is that people living in deserts are more likely to be in places with low humidity, making the device less useful.

So, just to add to that, there are arid deserts with high humidity air. One example would be the Atacama Desert where fog catching nets are used to collect water for drinking and agriculture. I expect it would work very well there.

So, perhaps it can also be of value in arid places where the air is high humidity like that, but there isn’t quite enough humidity for fog catching?

So, I don’t think it is really a scam, which is what you were asking. But their video seems to be somewhat over stating its value. Will be interesting to see where this project goes.

For more details see: This device may pull water out of thin air, but not as well as we hoped