Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) has signed an agreement with Greenstat Norway for setting up a Centre of Excellence on Hydrogen. This comes days after India unveiled a national hydrogen mission for accelerating plans to generate carbon-free fuel from renewables.
Key Points
- In the Union Budget 2021-22, the government pledged to focus on generating hydrogen from green power sources and to build a more efficient energy infrastructure.
- The agreement has been signed with an aim to develop a Centre of Excellence on Hydrogen (CoE-H) including CCUS (Carbon capture, utilization, and storage) and Fuel Cells by Indian Oil and Greenstat for clean energy in association with Indo-Norwegian Hydrogen Cluster organizations.
- The CoE-H will facilitate the transfer and sharing of know-how, technology, and experience through the green hydrogen value chain and other relevant technologies including hydrogen storage and fuel cells.
- The CoE-H will be a platform for promoting R&D projects in Green and Blue Hydrogen between Indian and Norwegian R&D institutions/universities.
- CoE-H will leverage its intellectual strengths for developing sustainable, scalable and cost-efficient technological solutions.
- The institute will also act as a think-tank towards developing standards and codes for best industrial practices, product protocols, safety, and regulations in the area of hydrogen and fuel cells.
- The agreement between IOC and Greenstat will actively assist stakeholders to develop business models based upon feasibility studies besides facilitating consultancies to industry, utilities, and regulators on hydrogen production, hydrogen storage, fuel cells, refueling stations, and CCUS technologies.
India is the 3rd largest energy consumer and its energy demand is growing rapidly. A pilot project is running at Rajghat Bus depot in Delhi for blending hydrogen with compressed natural gas to be used as a transportation fuel. Under this pilot, 50 buses in Delhi are plying on blended Hydrogen in Compressed Natural Gas. The results of the project are also encouraging.
