India sees hydrogen as transportation, industrial fuel

India plans to create a hydrogen-based economy focusing on transport fuels and industry as a way to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan said today.

A pilot project in Delhi to run 50 buses on a hydrogen-compressed natural gas (H-CNG) blend will be expanded to other major cities in the coming months, Pradhan said.

"Through technological advancements, we are blending hydrogen with compressed natural gas for use as a transportation fuel as well as an industrial input to refineries," he said. "We are looking forward to introducing H-CNG as an intermittent technology in a big way for both automotive and domestic cooking applications."

India's biggest refiner state-controlled IOC has initiated a project at a refinery in Gujarat to manufacture blue hydrogen using natural gas and carbon capture technology, Pradhan said. There are also plans to leverage India's growing CNG pipeline infrastructure to reduce the transportation cost of hydrogen.

India depends on imports of crude and LNG to meet 85pc and over 55pc of its requirements respectively. A spat with Opec and Saudi Arabia over oil prices has prompted the government to step up its search for alternatives.

Several states in India have announced lockdowns to combat a rising tide of Covid-19 cases, which crossed a record 200,000 in the last 24 hours. Cases have increased more than twentyfold since early February. India is the world's second most infected nation after the US.

Overall fuel demand in India contracted for the first time in the 2020-21 fiscal ending March, dropping by a record 9pc to 194.6mn t from 214mn t a year earlier, according to the oil ministry. Diesel use fell by 12pc to 1.49mn b/d and gasoline demand declined by 7pc to 647,000 b/d over the period.

By S Dinakar