On February 22nd, the Union Minister for Power and New & Renewable Energy, Mr. R. K. Singh, presided over a significant meeting on the Green Hydrogen R&D Scheme of the Government in New Delhi. 

This event was attended by the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India, Mr. Ajay Sood; Secretary of the Ministry of New & Renewable Energy (MNRE), Mr. Bhupinder Singh Bhalla; Joint Secretary of MNRE, Mr. Ajay Yadav; and other eminent representatives from the government, academia and industry from SECI, NCL, IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, IISc, NISE, BPCL, IIT Roorkee, IOCL, IIT Indore, IIT Patna, IIT Kharagpur, TERI, IIT Kanpur, Institute of Minerals and Materials Technology, DRDO, IIT Ropar, CSIR, HAI, BHEL, BARC, BPCL and private industry representatives attended the meeting in person and through video conferencing.

Mr. R. K. Singh reiterated that research efforts under the Mission should be focused on identifying primary areas of research, giving necessary support to research institutions, producing necessary technologies and bringing them to fruition.

Underlining the need to identify the priority areas, he mentioned that different fields of expertise need to come together to collaborate and work on identified priority areas and that increasing the efficiency of electrolyzers is a key aspect that needs to be looked into, to bring down the cost of Green Hydrogen. 

Mr. Singh also mentioned that consortiums could be formed for carrying out research in various areas of the Green Hydrogen value chain before making a presentation on the initial set of more than 40 problem statements that have been identified for consideration under the Mission, under four heads namely, production; storage & transport; applications; and safety, cross-cutting analysis & integration. The problem statements were shared with the stakeholders present, followed by a discussion on what the priority areas for the first round of R&D projects could be.