Dean's a very, very smart guy. I am apparently missing a critical part of the big picture.
You burn something, make electricity, use the electricity to run a machine that makes fresh water. but there are fundamental inefficiencies in conversion of heat to electricity, even in a Stirling engine, and there will presumably be losses in the electricity to water machine too.
Why not just make a "still" (distillation apparatus) that is directly heat-fired. It can be made from relatively cheap stuff and needs no real maintenance. You could probably make 20+ stills for the cost of the two machines. You could even skip the step of trying to make and contain methane from cow dung. Dried cow dung is used for fuel all over the world.
Can you get the same volume of water from a given amount of fuel? I don't know. Perhaps that's the genius of Dean's approach, but it seems terribly complex.
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