Just as the osmotic potential surface can be walked towards increasing gas pressures to track the phase stability under adsorption, the same process can be done in reverse for desorption. The exact same path is obtained for the equilibrium path, as only the single global thermodynamic equilibrium at each gas pressure is used to construct this path. From this approach, the experimentally observed hysteresis cannot be predicted. The kinetic paths (dotted line in Figure ), are very different in adsorption and desorption. Osmotic potential energy barriers during desorption, which prevent an op → cp transition, only disappear when the gas pressure decreases to 17.5 kPa. This prediction of an op → cp transition during desorption at a gas pressure very close to that of the op → cp transition during adsorption is in agreement with experiments, and can be attributed to the very flat osmotic potential landscape over the entire volume range at this pressure. Interestingly, by decreasing the gas pressure further, it is predicted from this surface that the framework remains locked into the cp phase, as is observed experimentally. This is due to the barrier surrounding the local minimum of the osmotic potential landscape in the cp phase at low gas pressures, keeping the system in this metastable phase.