The Indian Hydrogen Industry – Can it become a World Beater

The Hydrogen industry /economy has gotten a lot of press in the last couple of years as the panacea to solve the hard to abate carbon sectors. There are huge investment plans being made around hydrogen in the world with billions of dollars being committed towards manufacturing, research, distribution infrastructure, etc. Australia is already positioning itself as a major supplier and exporter of hydrogen utilizing its massive resources while countries such as Germany are partnering with suppliers to transition their economies away from fossil fuels in order to meet the Net Zero ambition by 2050. India unlike other times has woken up to this major paradigm change happening in the energy industry and has set up a National Hydrogen Mission. But the government has always been big in making announcements with little work happening on the ground.  Electric Vehicles was where a lot of sound and noise was made but the confusion and the turf wars between the ministries resulted in not too good a result. The FAME scheme has not really set the Indian electric scene on fire, with barely 4,000 electric cars being sold this year compared to more than 100,000 being sold in China and other countries.

The government can capitalize on the hydrogen technology not only to become green but also drastically reduce its fossil fuel imports of oil, gas, and coal as these can be used not only to power transport and industries but also to integrate solar and wind energy better into the power grid. Hydrogen will also allow India to utilize its abundant solar resources to become a major exporter of hydrogen to countries such as Japan and Korea which don’t have such resources.

However, to capitalize on this change, India needs to make policies and regulations to incentivize the growth of hydrogen during the early phase. India needs to invest more in research and development as well as the manufacturing of electrolyzers. With a larger scale, not only can costs come down, but India can also use this to export the technology and products to other countries as well. The energy transition can allow India for the first time to become energy independent and not be dependent on massive oil, coal, and gas imports from other countries. This will hugely reduce reliance on foreign exchange requirements and will massively improve India’s economy as well. India cannot allow this energy transition to pass by like the solar energy transition. Even in storage, most Indian plans are only on paper though the PLI scheme has been passed. Hydrogen is where India can take the first-mover advantage but it will require focus and coherence which are somewhat missing in India’s current governance structure.