The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) on Wednesday released a draft R&D roadmap for the green hydrogen ecosystem in India, which stresses developing fuel cells for long-range travel, particularly in the road transport sector.
The draft report emphasises combination of hydrogen fuel cells, advanced batteries, and supercapacitors that will be key technologies in the automobile sector in the coming years.
“Hydrogen technologies across the value chain are currently under development. Mature technologies such as fuel cells are not yet cost-competitive with alternatives, and other upcoming technologies promising lower costs are yet to prove long-term performance,” it pointed out.
The aim is to design affordable, efficient, safe, and reliable pathways. At the current levels of technology development, significant scope exists for improvement in each of these aspects. Accordingly, major economies and corporations are heavily invested in R&D.
Rationale
Currently, India imports around 85 per cent of its crude oil requirements. The transport sector contributes almost one-third of this, and road transportation accounts for around 80 per cent of the energy consumption.
“The country’s primary energy consumption is expected to increase by 70 per cent in the next ten years, because of which the gap between local crude oil production and consumption will keep on widening,” the report stressed.
This requires significant investments of resources in investigating, developing, and launching alternative energy systems, it added.
Electric vehicles (EVs) have emerged as a prominent alternative, particularly battery-powered EVs and those powered by hydrogen fuel cells. Globally, much effort is focused on lithium-ion batteries. India, however, does not possess significant lithium resources. Additionally, lithium-ion batteries are bulky.
To overcome these limitations, work is ongoing on alternative battery technology. However, for some applications, for instance, where a long travel range is required, fuel cells are necessary.
R&D roadmap
The roadmap proposes Blue Sky Projects, which have a long-term horizon of 0–15 years with a focus on establishing global IP and competitive advantage for the Indian industry.
Blue Sky projects will aim to develop the capabilities of the Indian R&D sector within an array of subjects, such as the development of reversible Solid Oxide Electrolysers (SOECs) and Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFCs).
For India, the transition to hydrogen and fuel cells may happen in cascading steps along six major heads: technology development, Demonstration programmes, Capacity building and Applied Research, Fundamental research, and Policy Framework, the draft roadmap noted.
It emphasised that research and innovation efforts will entail more efficient and cost-effective fuel cells and upscaling to higher capacities; simultaneous vendor development to make critical components of fuel cells (such as catalysts and membranes) available within India would make the fuel cells really affordable.
Together with efficiency improvements, and capex reduction, the resulting cost reductions should make it possible for wider deployment of fuel cells for many applications.
