EEWS program aims to become a global hub for research, innovation, and education with world-class facilities and personnel’s in fields related to sustainable energy science & engineering technologies. The program has three primary goals: first of all, we will drastically reduce current technical problems related to water desalination. Secondly, we will develop new technologies to support a global hydrogen economy. To enable a global hydrogen economy, we will develop innovative technologies essential to converting water into hydrogen, storing separated hydrogen, and using hydrogen as fuels. Moreover, as we refine and improve the sustainable route to regenerate liquefied hydrocarbon fuels from H2O plus CO2, we can also eliminate environmental problems associated with the greenhouse effects caused by CO2 emission.
To sustain the human habitat in the 21st century, it is recognized that we must solve problems related to energy, environment, water, and natural resources through science, technology, and the cultivation of skilled human experts. Also, concern about climate coupled with high oil prices is driving the increasing sustainable energy legislation, incentives and commercialization as a way to cut carbon dioxide emissions according to the ‘Kyoto’ protocol".
For example, all the global issues related to keep energy from our planet sustained are inter-related to the cycle of sustainable hydrogen and water depending on solar energy as shown in Figure 1.
In this view, we need to provide integrated solutions to sustainable energy & water, which are also indispensable for the world in post-oil era. The availability of clean water has emerged as one of the most critical problems facing the global economy in the future. Pressure-driven membrane processes such reverse osmosis and microfiltration are emerging as key components of water treatment and desalination systems throughout the world, but these lead to some serious technical and economic problems. Most of the capital and operating costs of membrane systems is associated with the high pressure needed to remove dissolved contaminants. Solar energy is sustainable on a millennial time scale. Addressing the major issue on how to supply transportation fuel, hydrogen, as part of a sustainable energy supply, can replace gasoline without the emissions of carbon dioxide. Hydrogen requires water as feedstock. Using water as feedstock, hydrogen can be produced by separating out the hydrogen from H2O. Combining low-cost and high efficient water desalination technologies with a simultaneous development of a hydrogen economy, we could make our energy systems sustainable based on the most abundant resource on the planet: sea water and solar energy. Hydrogen is an attractive option for sustainable energy because it contains the largest chemical energy per mass while generating only environmentally clean water as a by-product. To achieve this, we must be able to obtain pure water from the oceans and obtain hydrogen from that water in a sustainable manner.
Also, there is a special interest to carbon dioxide recently due to concerns over greenhouse gas emissions. A porous nanostructure with a high surface area and suitable pore size has emerged as the new innovative material that may have a great impact to capture CO2, thus to sustainable energy engineering. This is because carbon dioxide evolved from the fossil combustion could be reused in the innovative manner for regeneration of sustainable energy fuels because the captured carbon dioxide could be used to regenerate liquefied hydrocarbons in combination with water (see Figure 2).
The global problems related to sustainable energy engineering can be solved only through cross-disciplinary approaches and a wide-scale international collaboration among the world's leading scientists. The global problems that we face will require new ideas, enlightened policies, innovative technologies, scientific advances, a heightened level of awareness of the global problems, and healthy injection of significant resources. Most of all, it will require highly educated people, who have the ability, knowledge, and leadership in related disciplines to lead the worldwide effort. In particular, the core technology for the sustainable energy engineering is creating a new paradigm through the merging of NT (Nanotechnology) and ET (Energy and Environment Technology). Therefore, it is imperative to development an interdisciplinary program for sustainable energy engineering which includes the introduction of a new integrated curriculum. KAIST intends to become the leading research and educational institution in solving these global problems. Through this effort, the graduate program for EEWS at KAIST will create new technologies, open up new scientific frontiers, and produce future leaders for industry, government, and academia.
