Status of Current Hydrogen R&D Program in Korea

An increasing need for sustainable energy technology has become an issue of great concern throughout the world as well as an environmental solution for global warming. In spite that Korea is ranked the 10th energy consumed country in the world, about 97% of energy consumed in the country should be imported from foreign countries. In order to reduce the dependency on foreign resources and to solve environmental problem, the development of the hydrogen and fuel cell technology has been strongly supported by the government since 2003. Now, three R&D programs on hydrogen and fuel cell supported by government have been conducted and about 60 million US$ was funded to those program in 2007. In this paper, the current status of research programs on hydrogen and fuel cell in Korea was reviewed and specific achievements in some projects were described briefly.