This is not new. Matter/anti-matter particle fluctuations are a fairly mainstream understanding of ‘vacuum’. They need to be paired as such so energy is conserved. Some postulate that the entire Universe is one such fluctuation.
Never heard the Dirac quote before: That we live in an dense sea of particles and antiparticles, or that we could pull them out at will. Goodbye energy woes and goodbye to the need for a really good propulsion method that’d get us to the stars.