Context: The Ministry of New & Renewable Energy (MNRE) said that it has developed guidelines for funding of testing facilities, infrastructure and institutional support for the development of standards and regulatory frameworks under the National Green Hydrogen Mission.
About: National Green Hydrogen Mission
- The Union Cabinet has approved the National Green Hydrogen Mission. The initial outlay for the Mission will be Rs.19,744 crore, including an outlay of Rs.17,490 crore for the SIGHT program, Rs.1,466 crore for pilot projects, Rs.400 crore for R&D, and Rs. 388 crores towards other Mission components.
- MNRE will formulate the scheme guidelines for implementation of the respective components.
The Mission will result in the following likely outcomes by 2030:
- Development of green hydrogen production capacity of at least 5 MMT (Million Metric Tons) per annum with an associated renewable energy capacity addition of about 125 GW in the country
- Over Rs. Eight lakh crores in total investments
- Creation of over Six lakh jobs
- Cumulative reduction in fossil fuel imports over Rs. One lakh crore
- Abatement of nearly 50 MMT of annual greenhouse gas emissions
- The Mission will facilitate demand creation, production, utilization and export of Green Hydrogen.
- Under the Strategic Interventions for Green Hydrogen Transition Program (SIGHT), two distinct financial incentive mechanisms – targeting domestic manufacturing of electrolysers and production of Green Hydrogen – will be provided under the Mission.
- The Mission will also support pilot projects in emerging end-use sectors and production pathways.
- Regions capable of supporting large scale production and/or utilization of Hydrogen will be identified and developed as Green Hydrogen Hubs.
- A robust Standards and Regulations framework will be also developed.
- Further, a public-private partnership framework for R&D (Strategic Hydrogen Innovation Partnership –SHIP) will be facilitated under the Mission; R&D projects will be goal-oriented, time bound, and suitably scaled up to develop globally competitive technologies.
Why Hydrogen?
- A general trend towards development of better fuels is hydrogen-rich fuels.
- This means more of hydrogen in the fuel and less of carbon or more hydrogen to every carbon atom. Eg: Natural gas 4 hydrogen to every carbon as opposed to very little hydrogen in coal.
- This is because just like carbon, hydrogen is also combustible, i.e. it mixes with oxygen in the air and gives heat.
- In addition, moving from a solid to a liquid and then finally to a gaseous state energy carrier.
Nature Of Hydrogen
Hydrogen as an energy carrier
- It is important to understand that all fuels we have seen so far are energy carriers.
- Hydrogen is the best energy carrier as there are no harmful impact (read carbon emissions)
- This is because hydrogen is not freely available on earth, but it is in abundance in the form of in water and hydrocarbons.
- However, to extract hydrogen from water or hydrocarbons you need to expend energy and the energy spent in extracting hydrogen is much more than the amount of energy the so-extracted hydrogen gives out. This is why hydrogen is energy carrier and not an energy source. (in fact all fuels we have seen are energy carriers)
Combustible nature
- Hydrogen is highly combustible i.e. it mixes readily with oxygen to produce heat.
High energy density per gram
- Further the amount of energy out of this process is about 3 times higher than that you get when you burn petrol. (26 Kcal/gm for hydrogen compared to 10 Kcal/gm for gasoline).
Extremely low density per volume
- However, the problem with hydrogen is that it has low density, meaning the amount of hydrogen mass you can hold in 1 liter is about 71 grams.
- That means the tank size at normal temperature and pressure to hold hydrogen is very big.
- In other words, though the fuel itself is lightweight the tank size and therefore the weight of the tank goes higher.
- This puts a limitation on hydrogen being used as a fuel in private transport.
- Thus, hydrogen is suitable for large vehicles like buses which requires a limited range but can hold a large tank.
- This requires hydrogen to compressed at high pressure. Alternately you can liquify hydrogen by compressing and taking away heat.
How to Make?
- You can’t mine hydrogen. There is virtually no hydrogen gas (or liquid) in the environment.
- But there’s lots of hydrogen in water and in fossil fuels (hydrocarbons)-but not “free” hydrogen, the molecule H2.
- That’s what we want for the hydrogen economy.
- Two major sources of hydrogen on earth are water and hydrocarbons
- From hydrocarbons
- Take any hydrocarbon and treat it with steam we get syn gas which is a source of hydrogen.
- Any hydrocarbon+H2Oà CO+H2
- Hydrocarbon could be either fossil or biofuel or even organic waste.
- However, hydrocarbon source of hydrogen is again a problem because the left-over carbon has to go to atmosphere.
- This makes it dirty. That’s why hydrogen from these sources is colour coded with ‘dirty’ colours like grey, blue, black etc.