Mad scientist at work?

One of my ongoing duties to my embarrassingly small readership is to keep an eye on arxiv.org and report on papers that I don't understand but which still seem important, or at least entertaining.

My latest find is a topical one for Australia. The extremely prolific Russian-American scientist Alexander Bolokin has a recent paper with two novel approaches to extracting water from the air in large quantities. The paper itself, in far from perfect English, is here.

The two ideas:

1. A 3 to 5 km high (!) and 200 m wide inflatable tube is erected and supported by wire cables. Moist air is heated at the bottom, rises up through the tube (drawn up by the wind shear at the top of the open tube.) Moisture condenses at high altitude, is collected and on its way back down is used to generate electricity (through a turbine at the base, I think he means.) He also has a wind turbine at the top, although one expects that this may be rather heavy and not be good for the balance of a 3 km high inflatable tube. Solar cells on the outside of the tube get a mention too.

As I will explain below, Bolokin has a real fondness for high inflateable towers as potential tourist attractions, and this tower also has elevators and tourism built into the concept.

How much water does he think this will produce? About 224,000 Kilolitres a day. According to the Courier Mail, the south east region of Queensland was currently still using about 700 megalitres a day. So one tower does not do away with the need for rain entirely, but would make up a very reliable big percentage of daily use.

2. The second idea is to pump moist surface air through a tube beneath the sea to a depth of perhaps 30 m, where (so he says) the water temperature is 5 - 10 degrees. I assume water is then condensed out too, but the details of this method seem poorly explained compared to the big tower. Certainly, though, the engineering involved in getting air down to 30 m below sea level sound a lot less daunting than getting it up a tube 3 km high.

You can't accuse him of not thinking big, at least.

But is he making any sense at all?

One of his other recent ideas is for an inflatable space elevator filled with electron gas. His "electrostatic mast" would simply be built from the ground up, up to 36,000 km high or more. (Actually, he says that current strength materials would allow one to be built up to 500 km high; bigger ones require new material, I think.)

Bolokin notes that a feature of such a tower would be the "entertainment and observation platform", although he does not specify at what dizzying height this could be.

One other idea he mentions:

The airship from the thin film filled by an electron gas has 30% more lift force then conventional dirigible filled by helium. (2) Electron dirigible is significantly cheaper then same helium dirigible because the helium is very expensive gas. (3) One does not have problem with changing the lift force because no problem to add or to delete the electrons.

So, while he appears to have done sane enough work in past, has Bolokin jumped the shark with these ideas? Or is the future really inflatable?