Shipbuilding and offshore engineering is directly related to the shipbuilding industry and covers a wide range of disciplines, from the design of large ships to offshore plants. It opens up future possibilities related to the development of global energy resources, and its convergence with chemical engineering can create new opportunities.
Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering. It’s probably unfamiliar to many of you. Most people know that Korea is a shipbuilding powerhouse, but they don’t know that there is a department of shipbuilding and marine engineering, and in fact, there are only five universities in Korea. To better understand the nature of this department, you should know that shipbuilding and marine engineering is more than just building ships. It covers the entire life cycle of a ship, including design, production, operation, and maintenance, and in the process, it combines various disciplines such as physics, mechanics, electrical engineering, and materials engineering. It’s this integrated approach that makes marine engineering so fascinating.
As the name suggests, one of the biggest things that distinguishes shipbuilding engineering from other majors is its direct connection to the shipbuilding industry, meaning that the discipline is clearly linked to a specific industry. But it’s not just about designing and building ships – it also involves more challenging work, such as designing offshore structures, for example, and is closely linked to the latest technological developments, such as offshore wind turbines and offshore plants. Another big feature of the department that I’d like to highlight is its scale. To give you an analogy, imagine the Empire State Building (443 meters) lying horizontally in the ocean and floating, and you’ll get the idea. Ships of that size are being built in Korea’s shipyards at a rate of well over 100 a year. The discipline behind them is shipbuilding and marine engineering.
The container ship recently launched by Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering is the world’s largest 18,000 TEU (1 TEU is one 20-foot container). The hull is 400 meters long and 59 meters wide, and the deck area is the size of four soccer fields combined. That’s 18,000 6-meter-long, 2.5-meter-high containers, all at once. The ship’s size and price are far beyond most people’s imagination. High-value ships, such as drillships that float on the ocean and drill 3165 meters below the seabed, or FPSOs (floating production, storage, and offloading facilities), which are refineries on the ocean that refine, store, transport, and offload crude oil from the deep sea, can cost anywhere from about 600 billion won to more than 2.5 trillion won per unit. In recent years, just as the world has become increasingly focused on energy, the shipbuilding industry has also seen an increase in offshore plants to develop undersea resources, accounting for 75% of orders. This scale and complexity demonstrates why shipbuilding and offshore engineering is so important and why experts are needed in this field.
It is precisely because of this enormous scale and the need for safety and precision that the discipline of marine engineering is necessary. Because ships travel on the ocean, the study of fluids, including waves, is crucial, and the study of waves in particular is another characteristic of marine engineering that distinguishes it from other fields. These include the effects of waves on a ship and the flow of fluids as the ship moves forward. These studies are an integral part of the design process, as they directly affect the fuel efficiency and safety of a ship. Designing a ship that minimizes drag and maximizes stability is a very challenging task in itself, and there are many other areas of study such as ship control, noise, and overall production.
In fact, my path to shipbuilding and marine engineering was quite serendipitous. I honestly didn’t think that I wanted to do shipbuilding and offshore engineering from a young age. Most students in Korea think about which university to go to during their elementary and high school years, but they don’t really think about which path they should take. I was one of those students. Then, in my senior year, I happened to find out that there was a shipbuilding and offshore engineering department, and I joined it. But now that I’m here, I keep thinking that it’s a really good department. It’s economical, it’s futuristic, it’s big, and there are so many different fields and careers to choose from within it.
Since I chose to study shipbuilding and offshore engineering, I’ve had many opportunities to reflect on its importance and prospects. For example, after graduating from this major, you can work not only in ship design, but also in various fields such as marine energy development, offshore structure design, and deep-sea exploration technology development. In particular, the fields of eco-friendly ship design and marine renewable energy are becoming more important due to the global climate change problem. It is my dream to grow into a professional who leads these changes.
Among the many paths, I would like to study shipbuilding and marine engineering and chemical engineering together. It is undoubtedly true that Korea is the best in the world in shipbuilding, and the fact that the number one export item in Korea is not semiconductors, displays, or cell phones, but petroleum products, shows that the petroleum industry is also strong. However, people who only majored in shipbuilding and offshore engineering, or people who only majored in chemical engineering, do not know much about each other’s fields. Therefore, I think that studying these two fields at the same time will create a link and the synergy effect will be very strong. Moreover, as I said earlier, the world’s oil market is bound to become more competitive, as the world is constantly interested in energy resources.
Against this backdrop, I believe that as time goes by, the business of drilling for crude oil on the seabed will also experience a tremendous boom. This is a field that requires the convergence of shipbuilding and offshore engineering and chemical engineering, and it has great potential to create new opportunities. By doing so, I hope to contribute to further securing what my predecessors have done to make Korea one of the world’s leading shipbuilders. I also believe that it is my role to create a foundation for those who come after me to follow suit and go further in the future. That is my ultimate goal: to benefit Korean society through my efforts in the field of shipbuilding and offshore engineering.
