~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
Why we build
There is a thin blue film around this planet. Everything you have ever loved lives inside it.
Watch her. A polar bear, three days in open water, swimming through a sea that was ice within her own lifetime. Her kind spent hundreds of thousands of years mastering the frozen ocean — and in a handful of decades, we have melted the ground from under her. Somewhere ahead, she trusts, there is a floe that will bear her weight. Sometimes there is. More and more often, there is only water.
At the far end of the Earth, an emperor penguin chick stands where ten thousand generations stood before it, on ice that was meant to hold until it had grown its waterproof feathers. The ice no longer keeps its promise. The chick drops through, weeks too soon, into the sea it was born to command — and the sea does not forgive.
Do not mistake this for misfortune. This is the web of life being unpicked, thread by thread — and it is our hands pulling the threads. Even the ocean itself, the great patient ally that has swallowed more of our carbon than every forest on Earth combined, is turning acid in silence, dissolving the smallest lives on which every larger life is built. And here is the truth we least like to hear: we are a strand in that same web. What we unravel, unravels us.
None of this is mystery. We dig up carbon a hundred million years old and hand it to the sky faster than the living world can ever take it back — and that tide is still rising.
Oasys Systems is our answer. Not to mourn the breaking, nor merely to slow it — but to reverse it: to draw carbon down out of the sky with the wind itself, and to give back water to the places that thirst. The unravelling was done by human hands. So the mending must be.
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? Our August 2026 literature dive found five candidate families, including COFs already demonstrating ~17 cycles a day in outdoor air, but measured endurance still stops near 10² cycles. This remains the binding question. See the shortlist →
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. The technical summary covers the physics baseline, projected capture rates, the Step 1 sorbent shortlist, and the three feasibility gates.
Read the technical summary