I'm a career skeptic/misanthrope too...I get what you're feeling. "They could be presenting a Powerpoint presentation".
Here's why I think they're not, and why I would present this trade as a "good trade" whether it pans out or not. There's no substantial negative side found after exhaustive DD...if there's an IR/PR company inventing this company out of pure hype, they're one of the best I've seen (which means they'l force it to pay off somehow...PR guys do amazing stuff to stocks :-D I love em).
If you have an academic subscription to EBSCO (or know someone going to any university that can show them to you...ideally, you should have stayed involved with the university you graduated from to keep all the perks), search for all of the published papers on refrigerant research out of Texas A&M. Using water has been progressively researched and perfected with better and better papers since 2003. If it was still just an idea, it would have been presented back in 2003 when the idea was proven to be theoretically sensible, given the right motor design.
This trade show is not something a sane person would get involved in if all they were bringing was some brochures and a projector. They'd be laughed out of the building while setting up. If you see these shows from the past, it's all technology being displayed. There's also a lot of guys who are more hardcore pricks than me, who are there to rake them over the coals if they don't have fundamentals. If this is all smoke and mirrors, I want to meet the IR guys and buy them lunch...I'm in downtown Orlando, just south of the IR firm that's involved.