Comment Re:I've seen work on this (Score 1) 51
I don't know anything at all about this technology, I'd not heard about it before. I came to the comments to find out if it was relying on liquification of CO2, which I assumed, or was something else.
First point to note, 80 bar isn't high pressure in an industrial setting and 30C is low enough that there's large parts of Europe where you can assume that ambient air temperature almost never exceeds it. Therefore passive cooling is possible and in many cases, forced air cooling will be is sufficient. (I liquified CO2, indoors, in the summer months, as an undergraduate in the UK with only passive cooling required. I don't recall the exact pressure but it was around 60bar which suggests the indoor temperature was around 20C.)
A long pipe passive atmospheric heat exchanger is almost certainly all that is needed, much like the radiator on domestic fridge.
You don't mention it but the decompression cycle is likely more problematic as, I would guess, ice buildup might restrict the ability to use passive or forced air heating unless you're using dehumidified air (which you might be anyway to avoid corrosion). You also need to avoid the CO2 freezing.
Long term storage - while I suspect this technology isn't intended for long term storage and is expected to cycle in a few days, storing liquid CO2 isn't a problem. CO2 cylinders will store gas for months even after first use. It's not like helium where without incredibly careful setup, you'll lose all the gas overnight once you break the factory seal.
Likewise impurities, The initial loading of the CO2 will require a pure gas and you'll want water vapour in particular excluded. Trace amounts of nitrogen and oxygen probably aren't going to be a problem (I don't know about how they affect the critical temperature, it might be that they also have to be totally excluded but that just makes initial loading harder). But it's not hard to produce equipment that is impervious to CO2, N2, O2, Ar and H2O that can maintain integrity at 100bar (you've got about a 40:1 safety factor for steel at 100bar). If trace amounts of impurity are a problem then you'll probably need to bake the equipment to flush out the adsorbed gasses but I'd guess flushing the pipework with CO2 at high temperature would be sufficient, I doubt you'd need to get to CERN levels of outgassing elimination.