Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) is all set to build the country’s first green hydrogen plant at Mathura Refinery to meet the growing energy needs.

“Indian Oil has drawn a strategic growth path to focus on its core refining and fuel marketing businesses while making inroads into petrochemicals, hydrogen, and electric mobility over the next ten years”, Shrikant Madhav Vaidya, Chairman, IOC said in a statement.

The plant in Mathura will be India’s first green hydrogen unit. Earlier, the projects have been announced to produce grey hydrogen with the use of fossil fuels such as natural gas.

Vaidya added that the company has a wind power project in Rajasthan and the management intends use the power produced here to its Mathura refinery.

Vaidya said, “petroleum refining and marketing with higher petrochemical integration will continue to be the company’s key focus area and it will add 25 million tonnes (mt) of refining capacity by 2023-24. He also said forecasts by various agencies sees the country’s fuel demand climbing to 400-450 mt by 2040 as against 250 mt now.”

“There is a fresh momentum for scaling up hydrogen use across sectors globally. The company’s hydrogen compressed natural gas (HCNG) experiment in Delhi, wherein it converted 50 CNG BS-IV buses to run on HCNG fuel, has revealed benefits in reducing exhaust emissions and improving the fuel economy,” said Vaidya.

Indian Oil Corporation has also been pushing ahead with the research on carbon capture, utilization, and the storage technologies-space where it has been seeking global collaboration to meet its Paris Climate goals.

The green hydrogen will replace the carbon-emitting fuels that are used in the refinery for processing the crude oil into value-added products such as diesel and petrol.

He mentioned that IOC has got a number of expansions down the line which are already approved. The company will not have a captive power plant and will utilize the power from the grid, preferably the green power. This will help in decarbonizing some parts of the manufacturing.

IOC is going to add 25 million tonnes of its refining capacity by the year 2023-24. Currently, IOC is 8.5 million tonnes including CPCL, it is going to be 105 million tonnes.

Initially, this facility will be refuelling 25 buses per day with a ramp-up capability to refuel 75 fuel-cell buses per day. The project is likely to be operational soon, running the first set of buses from Gujarat Refinery to the Statue of Unity and other iconic sites in the vicinity.

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