IndianOil to test 15 hydrogen buses in Delhi
The Indian energy company IndianOil is inviting bids to procure 15 fuel cell buses. This marks the first project in the subcontinent to fully address all the aspects surrounding hydrogen-based mobility.
The fuel cell buses will be evaluated in collaboration with the selected OEM partner through field validation exercises in Delhi-NCR. In terms of hydrogen refuelling facilities for the buses, IndianOil is also setting up demo units of “approx. 1 ton per day production capacity for different pathways to produce hydrogen”, at the company’s research and development centre in Faridabad. The initiative is further supported by the hydrogen corpus fund of the Union Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas, which presumably means the hydrogen used will be grey hydrogen, produced from fossil fuels rather than green hydrogen made from renewable sources and a process of electrolysis. No details of the production methods for the hydrogen used were given in the article.
“One of the key ingredients of this project is that the fuel cell stack/system technology would be indigenously developed and manufactured in the spirit of the Aatmanirbhar Bharat, thus accelerating the creation of a local ecosystem to support further activities in the hydrogen energy domain,” added S S V Ramakumar, Director of R&D at IOC (IndianOil Corporation).
A number of oil giants, including Shell, are now backing hydrogen technologies as a green alternative to fossil fuels, others are using the hydrogen boom to repurpose existing fossil fuel structure such as gas pipelines, or to maintain a degree of relevance by making hydrogen via fossil fuel production methods.
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