India's Green Future, Built On Hydrogen

India’s biggest businesses are tapping green hydrogen as a future fuel. Can they overcome the viability challenge?

- P.B. Jayakumar

H2 In Numbers

90 MT Global hydrogen demand in 2020

6.6.7 MT India’s current hydrogen production

23 MT India’s estimated hydrogen demand by 2050

15-20 GW Projected green hydrogen installed capacity by 2030

$4-5 billion Estimated investment required in electrolysers for 15-20 GW

320 Green hydrogen production demonstration projects worldwide

THE LATEST BUZZWORD in the world of global energy aspirations sounds like the title of a blockbuster Sci-Fi movie — Green H2 -1-1-1 ($1 for 1 kg of green hydrogen in 1 decade). The buzzword may be new but the science behind it was dreamt up way back in the 19th century. “Water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable,” Jules Verne wrote in his 1875 novel, The Mysterious Island.

Hydrogen, nature’s lightest and most abundant element, can be used as energy after being taken out from coal (brown hydrogen), natural gas (grey hydrogen), renewable energy (green hydrogen) and water (blue hydrogen). Technologies for doing so have been around for decades but are yet to become commercially viable as output is less than the energy used to produce the gas. But this is set to change with governments and companies making hydrogen an important part of their carbon neutrality goals.