Upgrading Gangwon Province with High-End Hydrogen Technologies – Korea

Upgrading Gangwon Province with high-end hydrogen technologies – Korea.

Korea’s eastern Gangwon Province has long been known for its scenic beaches, ski resorts and unique mountain trails that attract hikers from all across the country. The province is now emerging as home to some of Korea’s leading up-and-coming technologies.

Three regulation-free zones designated in the province have allowed the region to test its edges in digital healthcare, liquid hydrogen and precision medicine since 2019.

And with the world’s growing demands for sustainable development and renewable energy resources in the face of the climate crisis, the province has attracted talent betting on those inevitable technological trends.

Kangwon National University (KNU) President Kim Heon-young is one of those tech-savvy trend leaders.

A former senior employee at carmaker Kia’s central technological lab working on then-popular Sephia and still-popular Sportage, Kim has signed a deal recently with architecture firm Wooseok for joint research into extracting pure hydrogen from thermal decomposition of combustible waste.

The school’s professors teaching hydrogen-carbon technologies, construction fusion and energy engineering as well as Wooseok’s chairman, advisers and the president of board of committee joined the signing.

He said the deal from late February would allow the new partners to create high value-added technologies for production of hydrogen, a “new, highly anticipated energy source.”

Kim Heon-young, KNU President, who holds a doctorate in machine design from Seoul National University, told The Korea Times.

With Wooseok’s high-temperature gasification technology and KNU’s electrochemical hydrogen sequestration technology, I believe we will have a certain synergy.

Under the deal, KNU and Wooseok will work on how to turn the country’s waste into fuel energy, how to produce and sequester high-purity hydrogen from synthesis gas and how to capture and use carbon emissions.

They share certain working theories in mind: completely burning plastic waste ― which hardly decompose when buried underground ― under 1,600 degrees Celsius to produce synthesis gas and use it as an energy source for fuel cells; or sequestering and refining hydrogen from that synthesis gas to use as hydrogen fuel.

“Gasification-based hydrogen production can minimize emissions of unused carbon dioxide and also capture carbon emissions produced during gasification, contributing to the national efforts to reduce carbon emissions,” Kim said.

Kim brought up the Paris Agreement from the UNFCCC’s Conference of the Parties 21 in 2015 while explaining what it is about the technologies touting clean energy and environmental benefits that so riveted him. He believed countering the climate crisis is an imperative task for Korea’s central government rather than smaller actors like private firms or institutions.

“Back then, the country’s governments and companies were laden with unprecedented burdens to lower carbon emissions. I had never seen such desperate need for eco-friendly future energy,” Kim said.

Alignment with Wooseok made the two agree on joining the country’s fight against the climate crisis and becoming a global leader in eco-friendly future energy production ― creating new fuel using gasification treatment of waste.

Conducting research with Wooseok has a strong possibility to posit KNU in the middle of Gangwon’s push for hydrogen production and distribution.

Sized 259,333 square meters across the province’s PyeongChang County and its adjacent cities of Gangneung, Donghae and Samcheok, the regulation-free zone for liquid hydrogen in the province is a monster playground for scientists and engineers from private and state-run firms that so far number 23.

With a state fund of 31.1 billion won ($25 million) to be infused until 2024, the research district is working on production facilities, storage tanks and recharging stations, as well as ships and drones running on liquid hydrogen.

What will spice things up even further is a new 330,000-square-meter industrial zone between Donghae and Samcheok, which is expected to be complete in 2026.

Dedicated to research about storing and transporting liquid hydrogen, it will house the province’s brand new assets in the ongoing energy bid, including a liquid hydrogen plant and a testbed for hydrogen recharging and hydrogen power generation.

If KNU’s Samcheok Campus (one of the school’s three campuses) works with this new development, it will create a new industry-education coalition that will usher into Gangwon a new force, according to Kim.

“Close to a liquid natural gas-producing facility in Samcheok, the Samcheok campus will be part of the country’s rising energy-resources belt on the east coast,” Kim said, adding that his school has won many government-funded research projects to improve the country’s hydrogen industry, including one from earlier this year hosted by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy.

The school has introduced earlier this year a new course in its drive to educate students about the impending climate crisis and how to prepare for it. Titled “Understanding SDGs” (Sustainable Development Goals), it is a prerequisite course for all students entering the school starting this year.

“We want to get through to the students about the SDGs that we often talk about as we discuss the climate crisis, and enable them to come up with real-life practices to realize goals as members of modern society living in diverse communities,” Kim said. Thanks for staying up to date with Hydrogen Central.

KNU is the largest national university in the country’s eastern region. It ranked sixth in Korea in the 2021 University Impact Rankings by the United Kingdom’s Times Higher Education (THE). It was also the third consecutive year that the school was selected by THE among the world’s top 200.

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