Over the years, various innovations have been implemented by the process licensors as an effort

to optimize the costs of liquefaction technologies and also to improve their efficiencies. Recently,

there are few liquefaction technologies which have emerged and turn out to be significant in terms

of the type of refrigerant and number of cycles. Among the technologies are Propane Precooled

Mixed Refrigerant (C3MR), AP-X, Dual Mixed Refrigerant (DMR), Mixed Fluid Cascade (MFC),

and Optimized Cascade (OC).

The Propane Precooled Mix Refrigerant (C3MR) process which is licensed by Air Products and

Chemicals (APCI), is currently dominating the natural gas liquefaction plant technology. A normal

C3MR process consist of two refrigeration cycles. A pure component, which in this case is

propane, is used for precooling cycle. Besides, a mixed refrigerant consist of nitrogen, methane,

ethane and propane are utilized for liquefaction and subcooling. In C3MR process, a single Air

Products coil wound heat exchanger is used to liquefy natural gas.

Also, the C3MR process has the ability to match the MR boiling curve with respect to the feed

condensation curve. Thus, it can achieve a very high efficiency. At various range of ambient

temperatures, the C3MR process is able to operate efficiently in arid and tropical climates.

However, the drawbacks would be the large inventory of propane and and the large plot space

requirement.