Currently in India, battery electric vehicles are more viable than green hydrogen & biofuels. But that may change as technologies are scaled up
Photo: iStock Hardeep Singh Puri, Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas, on Monday, flagged off the trial run of two green hydrogen buses in Delhi-NCR, according to media reports. The buses have been procured by India’s largest oil refiner and fuel retailer, Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), from Tata Motors.
These are the nation’s first green hydrogen-powered fuel cell buses. They will be powered by IOC’s research and development centre at Faridabad, which is producing green hydrogen for the pilot run, The Times of India (TOI) reported on September 26, 2023.
During the inauguration, Puri said that emerging fuels like hydrogen and biofuels shall account for 25 per cent of global incremental energy demand growth over the next two decades.
In a separate event organised by the Underwriters Laboratories Standards and Engagement in New Delhi on August 23, 2023, Nitin Gadkari, Union Minister for Road Transport & Highways also said that his ministry foresees a rapid growth of biofuels and hydrogen in India’s future energy mix.
Battery-powered electric vehicles (BEV) have been completely missing from these dialogues, although that may be a more viable clean fuel alternative.
The hydrogen buses to ply in Delhi have four tanks with total capacity of 30 kilogram and can be refilled in 10-12 min, which is similar to the refuelling time of petrol and diesel vehicles, according to the news article in TOI.
A single bus is claimed to have a range of 350 kilometres with all tanks full. In India, the current cost of production of green hydrogen is around Rs 300 per kg. At a minimum daily travel distance of around 100 km, a bus would need to be refuelled every three days at least, at a cost of around Rs 3,000 per day.
This is within the bracket of Rs 2,250-4500 per day fuel cost of a diesel bus in Delhi but much higher than the charging cost of around Rs 900 / day for a BEV bus plying in Delhi.
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will not solve the dual crisis of climate change and air pollution unless the fuel is green hydrogen, which is produced using clean energy.
The retail price of green hydrogen may be even higher than the production cost as of today. But, as with any other technology, green hydrogen would also become cheaper as economies of scale are achieved.
The drawback of BEVs in India compared to hydrogen-fuelled vehicles is that they are dependent on the global supply chain of battery raw materials like lithium, nickel and cobalt. These metals are subject to price volatility caused by factors external to the domestic Indian market.
Biofuels also have their own pitfalls, as pointed out by European policy advocacy group Transport & Environment in its article Food not fuel: Why biofuels are a risk to food security. The group reported that despite the looming risk of food shortages that could push hundreds of millions of people into food poverty, Europe continues to turn 10,000 tonnes of wheat – the equivalent of 15 million loaves of bread – into ethanol for use in cars. The danger to food security in the case of biofuels is real and imminent, the experts warned.
Seeing the emphasis on biofuels in India, it can be speculated that the country is inspired by Brazil’s success story, which is based on sugarcane as the raw material. Biofuels have been a part of Brazil's National Energy policies for nearly half a century. Biofuel production started in Brazil on a significant scale in 1975 as a response to the first oil shock. Ethanol production in Brazil has grown by 45 times on the back of extensive research made by the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation to improve sugarcane productivity.
However, India has a large population to feed and cannot afford to divert its food sources to fuel usage. It is commendable that the Indian approach to biofuels is somewhat different from the existing international approaches, which could lead to conflict with food security. It is based solely on non-food feedstocks to be raised on degraded or wastelands that are not suited to agriculture, thus avoiding a possible conflict of fuel-food security.
But biofuels are not zero-emission energy sources. Cellulosic ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions only by up to 86 per cent, while BEVs and hydrogen-powered vehicles are completely zero emission.
Though BEVs are currently the market leaders in the EV space, a balanced approach based on a thorough cost-benefit analysis is needed to decide any winners in this area.
The government of India needs to keep a close eye on the developments in the global hydrogen, biofuel and BEV markets and their supply chains before implementing any policies that might encourage one over the other.
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