The development of hydrogen infrastructure, from production to storage and distribution, requires substantial investment and long-term planning. Experts believe the time is ripe to move beyond declarations and take tangible steps towards scaling up hydrogen projects in India.  

Leading stakeholders from the hydrogen ecosystem in India deliberated upon the latest scenario at the 4th edition of NextGen Chemical and Petrochemical Summit 2024 organized by the Indian Chemical News in Mumbai on July 11-12, 2024.  

 The tenth session, ‘Hydrogen: Waiting for Big Ticket Projects’ was moderated by  Pravin Prashant, Executive Editor, Indian Chemical News 

Sharing his perspective on what is required to drive the hydrogen ecosystem, Kiran Kumar Alla, Senior Director - Business Development, Plug Power Inc. said, “The large scale projects will bring down the cost significantly and will help actually prove what is in theory on the ground. There are many pilot small scale and medium scale things happening but I think the real large scale like 100 megawatt plus kind of things will change the game. It is actually possible as we have done a 45 megawatt based hydrogen production plant in Georgia, giving us a lot of confidence that large scale new technology can be set up and expanded. Similar things in India would mean that the ecosystem will fully develop and everyone will understand the risk properly. That means the pricing variation will come down and the learning will be applied to the next project. So the first project versus the next next project will see significant cost reduction, especially soft cost particularly because it is where the uncertainty is very high. If the soft cost is taken care of, the incremental cost or the marginal cost of the next project will go down significantly. So from the perspectives of people, ecosystem, experience and licensing, there are many many things that the initial Big Ticket projects will be taken care of. So we have to really be supportive from all perspectives and ensure that these projects are successful and the learning is the biggest takeaway, not just the project.” 

“China has gone ahead with implementation and they have advanced alkaline technology to a great extent with the right PEM technology. We bought a technology company three years back and have scaled up and done a 45 megawatt and executing 100 megawatt project. Scaling PEM technology is not a problem, neither is the investment but the main challenge is the demand. Now the industry is waiting in anticipation and sees this as both an opportunity and also a challenge. But I think somewhere the onus lies on the government to decide clearly and with a clear path that hydrogen is necessary for decarbonization and it has a definitive role to play. The certain energy requirement we can meet through hydrogen and that commitment from a demand mandate perspective or a decarbonization perspective either carbon emissions or a specific mandate either of them will drive adoption immediately in a big manner. When it comes to export, there are more parameters to handle. It becomes more complex, so we had to kind of find a balance between attractiveness and feasibility and look at domestic projects first or export projects first. Either way if one project happens it will definitely support the next project if export happens first the domestic project cost will be down and then you can actually do a lot of them. That experience will help us become internationally competitive,” added Alla. 

Emphasizing the need to accord national importance status to Hydrogen Mission in India, Amrit Singh Deo, Senior Managing Director, FTI Consulting stated: "While we must replicate the hydrogen hubs in India on the lines of Europe, we at the moment are facing both planning and design challenges. Also, we need to balance out between pilot and mega hydrogen hub projects. Ideally, the project developers should get to decide the technology and scale of the hubs. Again, to push it further, the collaborative knowledge sharing model is very essential." 

”India hydrogen Alliance is backed by Reliance, Ramco, Sumitomo and Torrent power and a whole lot of other players as well both on the equipment side, potential off-takers as well as investors like the European Investment Bank. Among one of the early pieces of work that we did was to see what we can learn from Europe in terms of hydrogen valleys and how we can create similar valleys and hubs in India. That was the idea with which we went on to include in the Green Hydrogen Mission document and we started working with Kerala and proposed the Kochi Hub, essentially replicating a Hamburg Hub model where a port linked Hub where there's production and and consumption co-located at one place. If you take Kochi as an example, you can do the same thing elsewhere. You need an industrial off-taker so either a refinery, steel plant fertilizer plant, one of these three large off-takers and then from a volume standpoint maybe some transport off take heavy duty from a state transport department. Then we can say we have a hub, at least in theory that's as simple as it gets, the beauty of a Kochi sort of location. There is a BPCL plant and the fertilizer plant, both government owned and there's the state transport department. Currently individual enterprises are undertaking hydrogen projects with massive risk on their own. When we look at large projects, we went straight to exports. We didn't even go to 100 megawatts, we went to gigawatts, so either it is pilot scale or it is gigawatt. I think for a long time, we have been getting mixed signals whether it has to be an export hub or it has to be pilot scale because there's no demand locally,” elaborated Deo.

Sharing the latest updates at his company and also the latest trends in India, P. V. Balaramakrishna, General Manager – Technology, L&T Energy Hydrocarbon said, “We have actually commissioned our own demo unit with a bought out electrolyzer two years ago. Around August-September 2022, we commissioned our own demo as we gained firsthand experience. Then we decided to invest in this enterprise. As a manufacturer, we have a technology partnership with McPhy, France where we are assembling and manufacturing electrolyzer stacks in our Hazira facility in Gujarat. We have been granted PL with a capacity of 300 megawatt PEM and as things go we seem to be in a good position to meet that this financial year. The big ticket projects are not yet coming due many bottlenecks, especially electrolysis. It was not much talked about in the hydrocarbon sector or in the refinery sector because the other technologies which were gas based crude based had achieved much much higher efficiencies. It is not about hydrogen but its production using electrolysis. Renewable power has a cost to it and that will go into the final product as  it cannot go anywhere else.  When we talk about sustainability, the first geographical area that instantly comes to mind is Europe  because they are now as a society willing to bear those costs. This may sound a bit more philosophical but we need to answer this question to ourselves whether we are ready to pay more for a renewable product as compared to a less priced fossil based one.” 

Sharing insights into the government’s plan to develop 35 hydrogen run trains in India, Anil Srikar Pavuluri, Head - Business Development, GreenH Electrolysis said, “Indian railways is the first one to have floated a hydrogen based mobility tender in the market and it was launched in 2021. There was a competitive bidding initially and they thought the train that is actually a diesel locomotive has to be retrofitted into a hydrogen locomotive. There were around 35 trains which are being planned by the railways and out of which this is the pilot project. The train will operate from Jind –Sonipat section of Northern Railway and will travel at around 400 km up and down twice. We are actually setting up a greenage and the hydrogen refueling station for the particular project. Initially there was no electrolyzer involved in this as they only wanted to get the hydrogen from somewhere and supply it to the train then there was a fresh idea of going green because ultimately this project is going to go for heritage. As the concept of green hydrogen came in, there was a lot of delay from Indian railways in the sense that nobody knows how to do this. However, that has been resolved now and the train is under development now. It is a very ambitious project and India's first hydrogen 10 coach train would be the longest train in the world." 

From the train side, there are the complexities in terms of refilling and we are employing a 1 megawatt electrolyzer which gives around 430 GES of hydrogen a day and 500 bar compressor. Then comes the real complexity that is the storage as we have to employ around 3,000 kgs of storage, a high pressure storage of hydrogen. Hydrogen of course is a very light molecule uh we don't have first of all standards for storage. We have split it into two parts one is a 200 bar storage which is around 2,300 kgs and 500 bar storage of 700 kgs because for 200 bar we are storing in steel cylinders and that is approved by Petroleum and Explosives Safety Organization (PESO) but 500 bar is where we are having the problem as there are no cylinders being approved by PESO. We require Type 4 cylinders because those are the ones we need to use for continuous refilling purpose These are being used in the vehicle as well as the on run storage.We don't have the approval for that and have approached PESO. This whole project is going to take off only when we have the approval. Ministries are helping us out as they are framing standards based on existing ones in overseas markets,” added Pavuluri. 

Sharing his perspective from the R&D angle, Dr Kaliaperumal Selvaraj, Senior Principal Scientist, CSIR National Chemical Laboratory said, “In terms of R&D activity, the role of  CSIR is very important and we have been trying to address the problems. One of the labs has developed Type 4 cylinders, currently under testing and should be completed soon. That is one example and we need a lot of such kinds of activities for gearing up faster to kick off the big ticket projects. However, the problem here is that  the speed at which the R&D has to go, there is a lacuna. For example the first layout of the National Hydrogen Mission is INR 19,7 44 crore and about INR 400 crore were kept for the R&D which is about 2%. That is very low if you really want to become self-reliant. We import technologies and a lot of Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) activities running in the field, the service part of it, we need immediate action in terms of making the local skill set ready, readying the local supply chain.  Let's take an example of electrolyzer where Proton exchange membrane (PEM) is coming and it is expensive, Alkaline has its own problem and there are futuristic technologies like anion exchange membrane technologies. These are really very apt for an India kind of a landscape where we have the self-reliance on the core technology which is free from corrosive metals. These all will bring down the capex and I think the investment becomes much easier. Also, R&D funding and R&D activity should be accelerated to help this to go faster.” 

“While there are some programs in CSIR that are coming up in a big way such as solid state storage. But to reach global benchmarks, again a lot of R&D needs to be done on sensors, leak detectors. R&D based skill sets also have to evolve as well as the skill of even a common man at a fueling station and making him aware of how to handle hydrogen as it is a completely different product than other fossil fuel gases. The awareness is critical for the whole ecosystem including local supply chain and manufacturers. I think there is a lot of demand that is needed for R&D funding and probably that will push these big ticket programs in the longer run,” added Dr Selvaraj.  

The Summit was supported by DCM Shriram Chemicals as principal partner, Somaiya Vidyavihar University as academia partner, Cadmatic as platinum partner and Andhra Pradesh Economic Development Board (APEDB), Govt. of Andhra Pradesh as state partner.

Gold partners for NextGen Chemicals & Petrochemicals were Epsilon Carbon, Forbes Marshall, Gharda Chemicals, Indofil Industries, Ingenero, IPCO, Jaaji Technologies, Moglix, PIP, Port of Antwerp - Bruges, RIECO and Re Sustainability. Associate Partners are: HPCL and Nuberg EPC.

Supporting partners included Aarayaa Advisory Services, Archroma, India Glycols and Tata Steel Special Economic Zone and industry association partners are: ACFI, AMAI, CropLife India, Gujarat Chemical Association and PMFAI.