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Green hydrogen
Green hydrogen is hydrogen split out of water using renewable electricity. India's National Green Hydrogen Mission is now placing it where demand already exists: an award of production capacity has gone to four refineries, which consume hydrogen by the tonne to clean their fuels. Laboratory work meanwhile is chasing a cheaper way to split water, using sunlight directly instead of electricity.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2026: how green hydrogen is produced and the Mission's 2030 target
- Prelims 2025: battery electric and fuel cell vehicles as alternative powertrains
- Prelims 2023: uses of green hydrogen as fuel and in fuel cells
Two ways to split water
- Electrolysis passes electricity through water to separate hydrogen from oxygen, and is the route the Mission's money is built around.
- Photocatalysis skips the electricity: a photocatalyst absorbs sunlight and uses that energy directly to split the water.
- The catalyst has to pull apart the charges that light creates before they recombine, which is what limits the yield.
- Most photocatalysts that work are built on costly inorganic semiconductors or on precious metals, so the cost sits in the catalyst.
The Mission and how its money is awarded
- The National Green Hydrogen Mission, approved in 2023 and run by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), targets 5 million tonnes of green hydrogen a year by 2030.
- SIGHT, Strategic Interventions for Green Hydrogen Transition, is the Mission's incentive arm, and pays separately for making electrolysers and for making hydrogen.
- Hydrogen production is awarded in modes, and Mode-2B is the route under which refineries are allotted capacity.
Why a refinery is the natural customer
- A refinery already burns through hydrogen to strip sulphur out of fuels, so a green supply replaces demand that exists rather than having to create it.
- That hydrogen is at present made from fossil gas, so changing where it comes from cuts emissions without changing the refining process.
What has happened
9 Sep 2026
The Centre for Nano and Soft Matter Sciences (CeNS), Bengaluru, made a metal-free organic photocatalyst for splitting water with sunlight.
- It pairs aspartic acid, an amino acid, with perylene diimide, a light absorbing organic molecule, in place of a precious metal.
- In water the pair self-assembles into two dimensional nanosheets, which give nearly 18 per cent more photocurrent than the bulk form.
12 Aug 2026
Capacity for 30,000 tonnes of green hydrogen a year was awarded to four refineries under Mode-2B of SIGHT.
- Panipat and Numaligarh take 10,000 tonnes a year each, Bina and Visakhapatnam 5,000 each.
- The award is about 0.6 per cent of the Mission's five million tonne target for 2030.
PIB, 12 Aug 2026: Green hydrogen in refineries, battery storage and EV schemes (opens in a new tab)