GH Power: sounds like a scam?

In My Humble Opinion
1

There was a recent Yahoo article about this company. They supposedly react scrap aluminum and water to produce hydrogen, alumina, and heat energy. I’m not posting any links because the board software doesn’t seem to like them, but it shows up immediately in a search.

There’s no doubt that this reaction is ‘possible’, it doesn’t violate any laws of physics or chemistry.
But obviously it’s not a primary source of energy, since the energy comes from the aluminum which requires a great deal of energy for its original extraction from bauxite.

So, is this useful? ‘Scrap’ aluminum is hardly waste: it is easily re-used to produce new aluminum products.

The only economic justification I can see is that it possibly produces high purity alumina for technical applications? But that’s not really a mass market, and the ‘green hydrogen’ hype seems very misleading.

2

Gaining Aluminum metal from bauxite uses about 20 times more energy (essentially electrical) than recycling it.
Alumina has only use in abrasive, or in ovens (very high temp of fusion) but 90% of its use is…producing aluminum.
So , maybe not a scam, but certainly not the brightest idea of the year.

3

It almost makes refined aluminum into a bizarre energy storage and transport mechanism: expend (hopefully green) electricity to create aluminum metal, transport the aluminum, generate electricity “on site” using the aluminum, ship the alumina back.

I don’t have the numbers at hand, but I suspect the yield ratios are terrible. They probably make hydrogen look awesome.