A race is on to lead the world’s shift to green hydrogen, a potentially transformative clean fuel whose real-world application remains nascent. The latest entrant is India, which this month approved a $2.4bn subsidy package to turn its companies into leading producers, consumers and exporters of the gas. Can it succeed?
India is chronically dependent on imported energy such as Russian crude or Middle Eastern gas, a financial burden and strategic vulnerability for a country that will this year overtake China as the world’s largest by population. It hopes renewables will change this, with India’s vast sun-soaked lands well suited to produce solar power, for example. The country aims to build 500 gigawatts of renewable electricity capacity by 2030.
Indian companies see hydrogen as the next opportunity. The Adani Group, the ports-to-coal group owned by Asia’s richest man Gautam Adani, along with France’s Total, plans to invest $50bn to create “the world’s largest green hydrogen ecosystem” in the next decade. Rival tycoon Mukesh Ambani’s oil-to-chemicals group Reliance Industries says it will switch from “grey” hydrogen produced with fossil fuels to the green version by 2025 as part of a $75bn clean-energy overhaul.