Seoul National University's College of Engineering (Dean Byoungho Lee) announced on November 23 that a research team led by Professor Youngsub Lim of the Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering proposed a design for an eco-friendly ship equipped with a carbon dioxide membrane capture/liquefaction process that satisfies the IMO environmental regulations through his joint research with Professor Pyung Soo Lee of Chung-Ang University, Professor Umer Zahid of Saudi Arabia's KFUPM and  Dr. Rahul Anantharaman of Norway's.

 
Greenhouse gases that are released when burning fossil fuels, such as carbon dioxide, are pointed out to be the key cause of climate change. Under the recent Paris Agreement, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) is strengthening regulations step by step to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from ships, such as carbon dioxide, which is having a great impact on the global shipping industry.
 
Research is also underway on alternative fuels that do not emit carbon dioxide, such as hydrogen, but this is expected to take a long time before it can be commercialized, and there is no method to reduce carbon dioxide emissions for existing ships that will need to be operated for more than decades from now.
 
It is possible for the membrane (separator) process to be miniaturized and its energy consumption is small, but there is the problem of energy efficiency being rapidly reduced in processes requiring high purity. Professor Youngsub Lim's research team suggested the possibility of applying the membrane capture process to ships by combining the membrane capture process and the carbon dioxide liquefaction process to achieve the same performance as the existing absorbent-based process while reducing the size of the facility.
 
Meanwhile, this research was carried out with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea's Carbon to X technology development project for the production of useful substances, the Norwegian CCS Center and the Norwegian Research Council MAROFF project no. 320260 while the research paper 'Process design of onboard membrane carbon capture and liquefaction systems for LNG-fueled ships' containing the research results was published online in November 2021 in 'Separation and Purification Technology' (top 10% in the JCR chemical field), a top international academic journal in the field of separation processes, and will be published in February 2022.