CHENNAI: India will spend USD 200 million over the next five to seven years to promote the use of hydrogen, Indu Shekhar Chaturvedi, the top bureaucrat at India's Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, said at a virtual industry event on April 15.

Notably, India has asked its state-run oil and gas companies to set up seven hydrogen pilot plants by the end of this financial year, India's oil secretary Tarun Kapoor also said at the Hydrogen Economy - New Delhi Dialogue event.

Governments and energy companies around the world are betting on clean hydrogen playing a leading role in efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions, though its future uses and costs remain uncertain.

Oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan said at the online conference the government planned to scale up the use of hydrogen blended with compressed natural gas (H-CNG) as a transportation fuel.

Broadly speaking, a fuel cell is an electrochemical reactor that converts the chemical energy of a fuel and an oxidant directly to electricity.  Hydrogen has a long history of being used as fuel for mobility. More than 200 years ago, hydrogen was used in the very first internal combustion engines by burning the hydrogen itself, similar to burning gasoline today.

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