QUESTION; So this can work with co2 as well?
ANSWER; I would like to answer this question by explaining some of the reasons why we use Butane over CO2.
In Short: Labor, Time, Expense and Dangerous High Pressure.
CO2 is a chemical that goes from solid to gas without going into a liquid phase at normal pressures. However, when used as a High Pressure Liquid or Super Critical Gas at higher pressures you still are required to use expensive pumps to run your system. With all this pressure, efficiency is increased but at what price. The cost, time and labor efficiency is traded away. Pressure has some negative side effects as well. And it is very expensive and dangerous and requires a very high knowledge or molecular reaction and polarity or chemicals which is usually assumed you have when you purchase the equipment. Due to the danger and complexity required to run a SC System most manufacturers of SC equipment will be reluctant to offer assistance past setting up your equipment.
CO2 also has a covalent bond and is not totally non polar all the time which means for CO2 extraction to become effective at extracting oils, you may have to change its polarity or polarize the CO2 first. Your guess is what other solvent and how much are required to do this.
Butane goes into a liquid very easy and requires far less volumes of space to send 4 gallons of liquid through 1 gallon of plant matter. As a matter of fact, you need 4 gallons of space to send 4 gallons of liquid through. It is a liquid and not a sublimating solvent like CO2. It is a simple straight linear molecule with no isomers and is very non polar. These facts makes Butane a preferred solvent for extracting oils. CO2 is a high pressure difficult to use solvent for all practical purposes and usually is difficult to recover at best and can react with water in your plant products producing Carbonic Acid. Butane is an easy to condense gas and is easy to recover for reuse and can do anything that any other solvent can do and has no reactions with water in plants or anything else for that matter.
Both evaporate more cleanly. One is non flammable but to be effective can require a mixture of flammable solvent. Butane is no more flammable than the propane most people use when cooking over an open flame or the gas you use to cook on in your home. When butane is dropped below freezing, the container holding it can be opened and the liquid can be viewed inside. Much less volatile than people think. Volatility meaning rate of evaporation is fast and is easily vaporized. CO2 is far more volatile than butane but is non flammable. Although operating at high pressures have another set of risk to content with. Butane is extremely non-reactive which accounts for a more pure tasting product when dealing with consumables. CO2 can be somewhat reactive and can alter the taste to some degree which implies some reaction and additional compounds may be present. This could be due to the high pressures involved and can be avoided if carefully managed. Both CO2 and Butane have the ability to extract out and then preserve or harness some of the most precise fragrances and aromas due to the fact that both of them evaporate away cleanly at very low temperatures which ensure that non of the aromas extracted are lost during their removal. Nitrogen, Oxygen and some other exotic non recoverable solvents can do the same. The only one that can be easily recovered is Butane and is lower pressure in a liquid state and easier to deal with across the board.
Since we do not have to build small diameter 1 inch thick walls for all our solvent holding tanks to compress the solvent into smaller volumes of space, we can cut cost down considerably for the consumer. This allows many more people to jump on board and assist all of us in finding cures and producing medicine at a lower cost which makes distribution of some of the highest quality medicines available to more people.
You could use CO2 in our system as long as you keep the system open to the air and you don’t add more pressure to the system than butane would add under normal use. If you want to go above that, you would need another machine and much higher price tag and lot of instruction before you could use it safely and effectively.
The answer is yes you can use CO2 in this system only if you do not keep it a closed system. Allowing the pressure to escape from the bottom tank will leave you with a CO2 or Nitrogen or Oxygen only extraction capability. But why would you want to use such a low efficient, lower yielding hard to manage High Pressure GAS or High Pressure Liquid solvent when you could use liquid butane which evaporates 100% clean and is non toxic as well and can be recovered. If the FDA will allow it to be used to spray cooking oil into your skillet over an open flame then I would steer clear of the more exotic low performance solvents and stick with the high performance solvent. You can use Butane as the extraction solvent, carrier solvent, transport solvent as a liquid and then vaporize it away and or recover it. How much more performance do you need without any detection it was ever used in any phase of the extraction process.
Sincere Regards
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