South Korea’s shipbuilding and offshore industry is undergoing a transition to high-value offshore structures that began with a legendary ship order from Chairman Chung Ju-young, and is using its technological edge to meet new challenges.
Most Koreans have heard the anecdote of Hyundai’s founder, Chung Ju-young, who won a ship order by showing a Greek shipowner a banknote with a turtle on it. But what most people don’t realize is that there were no shipyards built in Korea at the time he received the order. He built the ship at the same time as he built the ship. In the conservative shipbuilding industry, where trust is highly valued, this unlikely story of winning a ship order with only a drawing of a turtle ship was the beginning of what is today one of the world’s leading shipyards. While the anecdote rhymes with “reckless courage,” the truth is that today’s shipbuilding and offshore industry is a highly advanced and technology-intensive industry, and at its center is shipbuilding and offshore engineering. In this article, we’ll explain what this is. To do so, we’ll start by briefly explaining the name of the discipline, how it relates to other engineering disciplines, what it studies, and the two engineering problems it addresses. Furthermore, we will discuss the current state of the shipbuilding and offshore industry, which is the foundation of shipbuilding and offshore engineering.
The name of shipbuilding and marine engineering can be divided into two parts: shipbuilding and marine. Shipbuilding engineering is related to ships, while marine engineering is related to marine structures. In other words, shipbuilding and marine engineering is the study of the engineering problems of all marine structures, including ships, that exist on the ocean. Let’s take a look at an example to illustrate what exactly it involves.
Let’s compare a tanker that transports crude oil, one of the products of the shipbuilding and offshore industry, to a human body. The engine of an oil tanker is like the heart of a human being. Just like the blood vessels that supply blood from the heart to the rest of the body, there is a lot of piping inside the tanker. Engines and plumbing are the domain of mechanical engineering. The human body is also made up of many organs, which are connected by nerves. Similarly, an oil tanker has oil tanks, navigation systems, and other equipment, which are connected by wires to provide power and control. These power distribution systems are the domain of electrical engineering. Finally, the hull, the skeleton of the ship that encloses all of this, is the domain of shipbuilding and marine engineering.
There’s nothing worse than working hard to build a ship, only to have it sink instead of float. Keeping a ship afloat is the most important issue in shipbuilding and marine engineering. To float, a ship must receive a force from the water equal to its weight in the opposite direction of gravity. This force is called buoyancy. The amount of buoyancy an object receives is equal to the weight of the water it repels. This is the Archimedean principle, and designing a hull that is properly buoyant is one of the first issues addressed in marine engineering. This consideration of buoyancy is unique to shipbuilding and marine engineering and is not found in other engineering disciplines.
Once the ship is afloat, the next challenge is to keep it afloat, or to keep the offshore structures in place. The former applies to ships, the latter to offshore structures. Anyone who has ever walked in a pool has probably noticed that walking in water is much harder than walking outside of it. This is because you encounter more resistance in water, which is much denser than air. Since ships and offshore structures spend their entire lives on the water, it is essential to study their behavior in water. Furthermore, ships and offshore structures float in the ocean with waves, not in a calm pool of water. Ships have to navigate through waves, and offshore structures have to stay in place through waves. The challenge of marine engineering is not only to make sure they can do this, but also to make sure they are strong enough to withstand the waves throughout their lifetime.
All engineering is influenced by the industry it is based on. In recent years, high-value-added ships and offshore structures such as drillships, LNG carriers, and offshore plants have emerged as the mainstay of the Korean shipbuilding and offshore industry. Drillships are ships equipped with equipment for drilling deepwater wells. LNG carriers are liquefied natural gas transportation vessels, which can be thought of as petrochemical plants at sea.
The rise of high-value-added ship types and offshore structures is driven by the Chinese shipbuilding industry’s low-cost volume offensive, which is heavily supported by the Chinese government. In the case of relatively easy-to-build ships such as oil tankers, the Korean shipbuilding industry is losing out in price competition with China, and profits are shrinking due to rising labor costs in Korea. Under these circumstances, the Korean shipbuilding and offshore industry is trying to increase its share of the high-value offshore structures market, where it has a technological advantage over China. As part of its efforts, it is cultivating human resources with marine engineering skills. In other words, whereas shipbuilding, or shipbuilding engineering, was previously more important, marine engineering for offshore structure construction is now more important. In line with this trend, the Department of Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering at Seoul National University has been making efforts to strengthen lectures on marine engineering and create a new curriculum since the 2014 academic year.
In this article, we have given a general overview of marine engineering and briefly looked at the new trends in the shipbuilding and offshore industry. To recap, marine engineering is the study of all structures at sea, including ships. Designing structures so that they can float, move, or stay in one place while at sea is a key challenge in shipbuilding and offshore engineering. Lastly, as the domestic shipbuilding and offshore industry, which is a basic industry, has shifted its center of gravity to the offshore industry, shipbuilding and offshore engineering has also emphasized marine engineering. However, the marine industry market is more conservative than the shipbuilding industry market, and the barriers to entry are very high. For this reason, domestic shipbuilding and offshore companies, which entered the offshore industry late, are unable to participate in the design phase, which is highly profitable, and are only receiving orders for fabrication and assembly, which are less profitable. Overcoming this situation and becoming more than a shipbuilding powerhouse, but a maritime powerhouse, may not be possible without a miracle, as Jung Joo-young’s anecdote suggests. However, this is the wave that Korea’s shipbuilding and offshore engineering and shipbuilding industry has to cross today. This time, I believe that preparedness, not reckless courage, will bring about another miracle.
