By: Sudeep S. Dalvi
Last updated : April 06, 2026 7:17 am
Hydrogen is a strategic architecture for energy independence, industrial competitiveness, and clean mobility
India stands at a pivotal juncture—balancing rapid economic growth with the urgent need to decarbonize. As we chart a course toward carbon neutrality by 2070, hydrogen emerges as a strategic, scalable, and resilient pillar of the transition, including mobility.
Why Hydrogen Fits India’s Long-Term Strategy
Hydrogen aligns with Energy Atmanirbharta 2047 and Net Zero 2070. India can produce green hydrogen using abundant solar and wind potential, biomass-derived hydrogen in agricultural belts,and blue hydrogen via natural gas with carbon capture. This enhances energy security and reduces import dependency on crude. Hydrogen helps decarbonise hard-to-abate sectors—heavy transport, industrial heat, steel, refining, and fertilizer—where direct electrification is challenging. This helps to build long term strategic manufacturingcapacity of electrolyzers and fuel cell stacks to storage tanks and refuelling hardware, creating high-quality jobs and local supply chains.
Hydrogen as a Systems Enabler
Hydrogen can store surplus renewable power for months, across seasons, solving variability and grid balancing more effectively and for longer periods than batteries alone.
Hydrogen connects different sectors: power, industry, and transport—allowing excess renewables to become transport fuel or industrial heat, smoothing demand, and supply across sectors.
Hydrogen infrastructure can support both mobility and stationary applications (backup power, microgrids), improving reliability during peak demand and outages.
Costs decline with scale—electrolyzer manufacturing, renewable deployment, and standardized refuelling networks fuel virtuous cycles of adoption.
No single technology can deliver Net Zerodue toIndia’s diversity of geography, resources, and use-cases. Hydrogen promotes electrified mobility by enabling long-range, heavy-duty, and quick-refuel applications where uptime and payload matter. Hydrogen can include biofuels in agriculture and aviation pathways, while hydrogen-derived e-fuels and ammonia serve shipping and industrial heating. CNG/LNG with pilot-scale blends of hydrogenas transitional fuels in select corridors, paving the way for deeper decarbonization.
Hydrogen thus does not replace other paths— it integrates them, making India’s decarbonization resilient, affordable, and tailored to local constraints.
India’s actions to building hydrogen ecosystem:
India has excellent capacity building program ‘National Green Hydrogen Mission for 2030’ and beyond, fully supported by the government with clear targets for production capacity, incentives, target usage areas.
The focus begins with decarbonisation of fertiliser, refineries/petrochemical industries, hard to abate sectors: Steel, Cement, Aluminium, then transportation, mainly buses and trucks.
Why Hydrogen will be a long lasting solution for heavy transport?
Performance & Uptime in Heavy Transport
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCEVs) offer fast refuelling (5~10 minutes, similar to diesel), long range, and high payload—critical for freight and public transport where vehicle downtime is costly. FCEVs maintain performance across extreme temperatures and duty cycles, making them strong candidates for intercity trucks and buses, especially on fixed-routecorridors.
Total Cost of Ownership Improves with Scale
While early-stage hydrogen may carry premium costs, fleet operations—buses, trucks, and depot-based logistics—can optimize utilization of refuelling infrastructure. As electrolyzer, renewable, and fuel cell costs fall, hydrogen becomes competitive, particularly for high-mileage, high-mass use-cases. Moreover, hydrogen’s dual role (mobility and stationary backup) improves asset utilization and economics. Hydrogen brings in valuable carbon credits which further reduces the TCO.
Global Approach: Learning, Localizing, Leading
Technologies for production, storage and use have matured and are implementation ready. The challenge is to step out of the chicken-egg conundrum and kickstart the hydrogen ecosystem. Different countries have different strategies towards adoption of hydrogen.
Consortium approach:
Hydrogen society/ecosystem needs multiple stakeholders for effective operation & sustenance. Governments/industry/customers alone cannot drive the success. Many countries have adopted the ‘Consortium approach’ to boost the hydrogen ecosystem.
HYGEAR: See Hydrogen Ltd. (Bulgaria) HyGear (Netherlands), and Green Energy Park-Global (Netherlands), RESATO Hydrogen Technology (Netherlands)
HydroGEN Consortium: A United States DOE sponsored program for R&D in splitting water
Hydrogen Council: Global Consortium with 140 members
Hydrogen Strategy of Asian countries
Japan
Japan created the world’s first Hydrogen Policy in 2017, outlining technologies related to hydrogen: production, transportation, and combustion updated periodically to reflect the evolving environment. Government and private sector plan to mobilize around ¥15 trillion ($100+ billion) over the next 15 years to build a hydrogen supply chain, reduce costs, and scale infrastructure. Japan started utilizing Hydrogen in Commercial Vehicle space. Govt. & industry had set aggressive target to expand the FC vehicles from current 7,700+ vehicles to 800,000 vehicles by 2030. Japan Govt. is also offering significant incentives to cover ~75% of the new vehicle cost.
Japan has set up a consortium: Japan H2 Mobility (JHyM) consisting of 11 companies: AutoOEMs, banks, Gas distribution companies in line with global pathways.
China
China is leading globally in building a comprehensive hydrogen ecosystem, driven by strong government policy, massive production, and rapid deployment, especially in fuel cell vehicles (FCVs). China’s strategy (mid-long term till 2035) is to establish domestic R&D and manufacturing of core components (PEM electrolyser, fuel cells, hydrogen storage tanks), with emphasis on Transportation, Energy storage, Generate electricity and Industry, in that order.
China has consortia: Central Enterprise Green Hydrogen Consortium, China Hydrogen Alliance (CHA), UNIDO Green Hydrogen Project, among the significant.
Toyota’s Hydrogen leadership in India
Toyota’s leadership in fuel cell technology provides a mature, multi-application platform that aligns naturally with Hydrogen Highways: One stack, many use cases, proven and reliable performance across mobility and stationary platforms and seamless fit into hydrogen production and refuelling reducing technology risks for all stakeholders.
Toyota Kirloskar Motor (TKM) initiated hydrogen mobility in 2019 using Toyota Mirai Gen #1 to initate studies with government agencies, helping seed the hydrogen ecosystem in India. TKM is focussing on building a strong self-sustaining hydrogen ecosystem with pilot/demonstration projects across the spectrum, not limited to mobility only.
MoU with NISE (under MNRE) Government of Kerala
Toyota Mirai Gen#2 will be used to study the feasibility of FuelCell EVs with the hydrogen ecosystem in India: domestic hydrogen production & refuelling, performance on India roads and weather, generating valuable data for both GoI & OEMs.
Toyota’s Fuel cell stack integration with Ashok Leyland truck
Toyota Kirloskar Motor (TKM) partnered with Ashok Leyland to advance zero-emission commercial mobility in India by supplying their advanced hydrogen fuel cell modules.
With IOCL
Since 2020, Toyota's Mirai fuel cell vehicle successfully completed refueling trials at the IOCL R&D Faridabad hydrogen station, proving its compatibility with India's developing green hydrogen infrastructure and supporting national goals for sustainable mobility.
MoU with Ohmium
This covers a wide range of applications from production of hydrogen to deployment of fuel cells to create microgrids . These are suitable for numerous self sufficient applications.
Kick-starting FCEV Commercial Transport in India
The primary obstacle to overcome is the high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This high TCO stems from several key, interconnected challenges such as vehicle costs, hydrogen production, infrastructure gaps, and storage and transportation. Addressing these challenges, particularly lowering the cost of hydrogen production and developing robust infrastructure, is crucial for FCEVs to become economically viable and competitive with other zero-emission options like BEVs, especially for long-haul applications.
Create demand for hydrogen
Accelerate hydrogen adoption by establishing refuelling stations along high-demand corridors, starting with a base fleet to ensure sustainable demand. As routes expand, this model enables rapid breakeven for both infrastructure and vehicles, fostering a virtuous cycle of growth. Standardized storage and dispensing protocols are crucial to ensuring a seamless, reliable refuelling experience.
Reduce acquisition cost of Fuel cell trucks
A public procurement program similar to PM E-DRIVE would generate initial demand through government fleets, municipal buses, and strategic industrial users. Furthermore, utilizing carbon markets and green certification to monetize well-to-wheel emissions reductions would significantly improve the Total Cost of Ownership.
The increased number of trucks on the road helps lower electrolyser cost due to higher volume effect. This pushes more R&D effort towards making fuel cells cheaper and easier to manufacture propagating a self-sustaining cycle.
Final Frontier: Hydrogen Production and Price
While green hydrogen is the ultimate goal for net-zero, its required production volumes and cost-competitiveness are still several years away. It is smart to start with existing blue (/grey) hydrogen to grow volumes of hydrogen availability, refuelling stations, and trucks. Blue (/grey) hydrogen is relatively affordable making it attractive, now! This approach helps refuelling stations break even earlier. As electrolyser costs fall and production scales, pivoting to green hydrogen is critical. By bypassing new refueling infrastructure, green hydrogen can achieve near parity with conventional fuels. This self-sustaining hydrogen ecosystem can easily expand to include passenger buses & cars.
Moreover, establishing an all-stakeholder India-centric hydrogen consortium will act as a force multiplier, accelerating the implementation of a national hydrogen society roadmap
Conclusion: A Highways-to-Hydrogen Flywheel
Green hydrogen generates a powerful virtuous cycle: as renewable energy grows, it fuels the adoption of hydrogen in fleets and heavy industry. This increasing adoption makes investing in refueling infrastructure more attractive, which in turn reduces costs, driving even higher adoption, while shared technology components bolster scale advantages.
For aself-reliant India by 2047 on the path to Net Zero by 2070, hydrogen is not just a fuel—it is a strategic architecture for energy independence, industrial competitiveness, and clean mobility.