From Promise to Purchase: Unlocking India’s Green Hydrogen Demand

Green hydrogen is a cornerstone of India’s net-zero pathway, critical for decarbonizing hard-to-abate sectors such as refining, fertilizers, steel, and chemicals, and reducing import dependence. Recognizing this potential, the government has set a near-term production target of 5 million metric tons (MMT) of green hydrogen by 2030, backed by the National Green Hydrogen Mission and related policy efforts.

India’s policy push has generated strong supply-side momentum. The announced production capacity has already exceeded the 5 MMT target by over 2.5 times. Yet, actual implementation remains limited — commissioned capacity is still below 0.01 MMT as of 2024.

This gap between ambition and adoption reflects key challenges such as high production costs, limited enabling infrastructure, and restricted access to affordable capital. Without strong demand signals, many announced projects risk not moving forward.

To address this challenge, this report presents a set of targeted demand-side strategies. It estimates that implementing targeted demand-side strategies could unlock between 2.1 and 5 MMT of green hydrogen demand by 2030, helping India meet its national target and positioning itself competitively in global markets. The report quantifies this potential through sector-specific demand scenarios, shown below.

This report outlines five strategies to unlock 2.1–5 MMT of green hydrogen demand by 2030:

• Blending in high volume sectors: 0.8–3.0 MMT through gradual blending of green hydrogen into grey hydrogen and natural gas in refining, fertilizer production, and piped natural gas networks
• Substitution in niche industries: 0.04–0.07 MMT by targeting cost-sensitive users in chemicals, glass, and ceramics
• Green public procurement: 0.4–0.6 MMT through mandated use of green steel in public infrastructure projects
• Export of green hydrogen and ammonia: 0.75–1.1 MMT by supplying early-adopter markets like the EU, Japan, and South Korea
• Export of green hydrogen-embedded products: 0.1–0.2 MMT from exporting green steel and other products to carbon-regulated markets

Together, these strategies represent a major opportunity to create market pull. In addition to demand-side pathways, the report provides a comprehensive overview of the enablers necessary to scale India’s green hydrogen ecosystem. These include risk-reducing offtake mechanisms, financial support instruments such as viability gap funding and sovereign guarantees, infrastructure development through hydrogen hubs, and harmonization with global certification frameworks.

With the right interventions in place, India can translate its green hydrogen market ambition into actual offtakes.