Indian Oil Corporation to Build Country’s First Green hydrogen Plant

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India’s largest oil firm, Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOC) has announced plansto build the first-ever commercial green hydrogen plant at its Mathura refinery in Uttar Pradesh. 

IOC has taken this step intending to maintain focus on its core refining and fuel marketing businesses while making bigger inroads into petrochemicals, hydrogen and electric mobility over the next 10 years, says IOC chairman, Mr. Shrikant Madhav Vaidya.

According to the sources, the company will not set captive power plants at all its future refinery and petrochemical expansion projects and instead use the 250 MW of electricity it produces from renewable sources like solar power. 

The company has a wind power project in Rajasthan. And now intends to wheel that power to its Mathura refinery and use that electricity to produce green hydrogen through electrolysis. Notably, this will be the country’s first green hydrogen plant. 

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Before that, plants producing hydrogen have been announced too but, with fossil fuels such as natural gas.But, these processes leave a massive carbon footprint hence. However  processes such as methane pyrolysis and water electrolysis can be done directly with any source of electricity, such as solar power, that produces Green Hydrogen, which is a clean energy fuel.  

“Mathura has been selected under its proximity to TTZ (Taj Trapezium Zone),” Vaidya said adding the green hydrogen will replace carbon-emitting fuels that are used in the refinery to process crude oil into value-added products such as petrol and diesel. He said all of the expansion projects will use grid electricity, preferably green power to meet the energy requirements.

IOC has got several expansions down the line which are already approved. This will help decarbonize some parts of the manufacturing too. IOC’s refinery expansion plans include raising the capacity of units at Panipat in Haryana and Barauni in Bihar and setting up a new unit near Chennai.

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IOC is going to add 25 million tonnes of its refining capacity by the year 2023-24. According to the Chairman, it stands at 80.5 million tonnes now including CPCL and is going to be 105 million tonnes. 

Earlier, IOC had invited bids for the supply of PEM fuel cell buses in December 2020, and Tata Motors was selected as the winner for the 15 hydrogen-based proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell buses. All 15 buses will be delivered within 144 weeks from signing the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).

According to the firm, IOC already has installed 286 charging stations, including swapping stations, across the country, which will be raised to 3,000 EV charging stations in the next few years.