The key attributes of a green separation are energy efficiency and low environmental impact providing a sustainable operation. On a unit mass basis, pharmaceutical industry carries a significant burden of separation due to the need for high purity products. Due to environmentally benign nature of CO2, supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) and supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) are making inroads in pharmaceutical separations. The high equipment cost is being offset by savings in the energy cost and improvement in the product quality. The key applications are in the control of process impurities such as chemical intermediates and residual solvents, and in polymorphic control and chiral resolution. From supercritical fluid, the product can be recovered by simple depressurization. This instant solute-supercritical fluid separation is a specific feature of SFC, as opposed to that in liquid chromatography where the solute recovery and solvent regeneration is done in a separate downstream process. In addition, due to the low viscosity combined with high diffusivity, SFC is about 3-5 times faster than liquid chromatography. A notable example is the much improved chiral separation in the pharmaceutical industry. The use of CO2 in separations does not add the greenhouse effect. CO2 comes as a byproduct from the chemical industry or beverage fermentation. In fact, due to the reduction in energy use (as compared to solvent based processes), SFC and SFC help reduce the net CO2 emission.