Recycling Ships Will Make Earth Greener

By Cho Jin-seo

Staff Reporter

Green has become a buzzword at KAIST, and its grandest green project is the recycling of aged container ships into mobile water and electricity plants for the poorest regions of the world.

The project, which is led by professor Lee Jae-kyu of KAIST Business School, is an inter-disciplinary project of 14 KAIST professors from various research fields. They hope that this audacious project will be able to win $25 million in financial support from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia over the next five years.

According to the plan, retired container ships will be equipped with solar panels, desalination facilities and hydrogen batteries at dockyards. It will then be moved to the Middle East or African countries and will lower its anchor where fresh water is needed.

Using a solar generation panel that covers the upper deck, the ship will generate electricity during the daytime and will use the energy to produce fresh water from sea water, then carried through a pipeline inland where it will be used for irrigation and deforestation prevention.

The extra electricity will be stored in capacitors, which use certain metals for the storage of hydrogen molecules. At night, the hydrogen in the form of gas will be removed and burnt to keep the desalination facility running.

Inspectors from the royal Saudi institution finished their evaluation of the KAIST project and their final decision is due this week, Dean Lee said. So far, 18 universities around the world are known to be competing for five spots that will receive the generous funding from the Saudi state university.

Another major ongoing project at KAIST is the ``mobile harbor.'' In partnership with Incheon City and its port authority, the school plans to build a floating cargo unloading system that can reduce the workload of on-shore cranes at the world's busiest ports, such as Incheon, Busan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

A critical part of the mobile harbor project is to design the offshore structure to stay stationary against tides and waves, KAIST President Suh Nam-pyo says.

``It will be a very challenging and an interesting topic for mechanical engineers,'' said Suh, who himself was a highly established mechanical engineer at MIT. ``I wish I could quit this president's job and work on this project,'' he said jokingly.

indizio@koreatimes.co.kr