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At first I thought that would be wildly impractical but CO2 goes supercritical at just shy of 90°F and a little over 1kpsi. Those kinds of pressures are pretty well unknown in a substation, but occur all the time in refineries and the like. It's basically just a pressure vessel with a relatively mild heater requirement. Eminently doable. I think we will probably see these deployed in the next few decades. SF6 is an amazing material but really, really horrible as a greenhouse gas.


For years they had an SF6 tank in my building because somebody had a wind tunnel (the first photo)

https://batl.mae.cornell.edu/facilities/

the machine is still there but they took out the SF6 tank.


Super critical c02 is a regular extraction process method for certain molecules! You can find it in a number of laboratory applications. Anyway, yes, doable - essentially for the reasons you mention. But also literally done at the moment, for the general extraction process capabilities of supercrit CO2


Here's a guy playing with a supercritical CO2 pressure vessel on a table (seems a little brave to be shaking something at such high pressures!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d7RGQMCX24




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