~10 km²
Sorbent mesh area per sail, flown through moving air instead of waiting for still air to arrive
Atmospheric carbon & water recovery
Let the wind do the work of capturing carbon.
Oasys Systems is developing the Oasys Sail: a kilometer-scale sorbent mesh flown on tethered aerostats in high-wind coastal regions. Wind delivers the air. Moisture-swing chemistry releases the CO₂. Recovered atmospheric water closes the loop — and becomes a second product.
See how it works0.7–1.8 Mt CO₂/yr
Back-of-envelope capture estimate for a single sail — orders of magnitude beyond a still-air flat sheet
→ Gt/yr scale
A fleet of a few hundred sails approaches the annual removal the IPCC associates with direct air capture
The concept
Air through the sorbent, not past it.
Conventional direct air capture spends most of its energy moving air. The Oasys Sail inverts that: it keeps proven moisture-swing sorbent chemistry but changes the geometry — from fixed tiles on a column to a permeable mesh held aloft where the wind already blows. When wind replaces fans and natural convection, throughput stops being limited by air delivery and starts being limited by engineering.
Wind-driven delivery
Tethered aerostats hold the sorbent mesh in persistent coastal winds. Air passes through the material continuously — no fans, minimal electricity, designed toward self-powered operation.
Moisture-swing capture
The sorbent binds CO₂ when dry and releases it when wet — the passive chemistry pioneered by Klaus Lackner. Captured atmospheric water drives the regeneration cycle and rinses the mesh clean.
Two products, one loop
Concentrated CO₂ for storage or synthetic fuels, and surplus recovered water as a second output — an oasis made from air, in the regions that need both.
Honest engineering
The concept isn't contradicted by physics. It's bottlenecked by engineering.
We publish the open questions because they define the work. These are the feasibility studies that would justify a pilot testbed.
Sorbent cycle life
Can a moisture-swing sorbent survive roughly 10⁵ wet/dry cycles — about 20 cycles a day for a decade — without losing working capacity? Published studies stop well short of that. This is the binding question.
Capture efficiency
The mesh must capture a meaningful fraction of the CO₂ in air moving through it — a target of η ≥ 0.3 at wind speeds around 10 m/s — without so much flow resistance that the wind simply goes around.
Structure & lift
Kilometer-scale aerostat architecture: tether loads, mesh tensioning, lift gas selection, and survival through storms in exactly the high-wind sites the concept depends on.
Collaborate
We're designing the feasibility studies now.
Oasys Systems is seeking collaborators across sorbent materials science, aerostat structures, and atmospheric modeling — and conversations with researchers, funders, and partners who want to pressure-test the numbers. A two-page technical summary is available on request.