Hydrogen is the long run, be it for vehicles or industries, and taking a look at its potential, many massive names within the automotive trade have positioned their cash on it. Bosch, for instance, has plans to speculate 500 million euros in direction of manufacturing electrolysers to provide inexperienced oxygen by the top of the last decade. However, for India to be self-dependent, the nation must manufacture hydrogen domestically.

Reliance, once more an enormous identify within the nation and globally, has introduced that it’ll transition to manufacturing inexperienced hydrogen by 2025. However, when sustainability comes into query, each step taken in direction of the objective of unpolluted air counts.

In this course of of producing inexperienced hydrogen, electrolysers are a key ingredient and their manufacturing is necessary. One such firm engaged on manufacturing electrolysers is Bangalore-based Newtrace. The expertise firm focuses on decarbonisation by means of innovation. Speaking to Express Mobility, Prasanta Sarkar, the CEO and Co-Founder says, “Most of the innovations taking place are incremental, meaning something’s out, then it’s repackaged and sent. When we started, our aim was to make strides in innovation.”

Sarkar goes on to say that when Newtrace began two years in the past, the battery section was turning into saturated when it comes to chemistry and felt hydrogen was not being addressed. “Hydrogen not only has the ability to address the carbon footprint when it comes to mobility but many other sectors too. We wanted to build a solution to address almost 70 percent of the global emission,” says the CEO.

However, entry to expertise was a problem. “Billions of dollars of investment towards green hydrogen, but access to technology was limited, so we developed the technology to make electrolysers in-house. We are now working on scaling it up to meet demands,” says Sarkar.

The course of is identical, Newtrace makes use of water to separate oxygen and hydrogen utilizing renewable vitality, nevertheless, they’ve made adjustments to the expertise to assist with the method. Newtrace claims that it’s the solely Indian firm to have indigenously developed electrolysers at a business scale. Biomass will also be used, “but can’t be scaled up to a commercial level,” he says.

Sarkar says, “India has access to electricity on a large scale, along with sea water, which are two key components of making hydrogen. In India, we currently need 8 million tonnes of hydrogen every year and this comes from natural gas. That’s why technology needs to be scalable and the key component for this is the electrolyser. The current electrolysers used contain rare earth materials like titanium, gold, platinum and other membranes which are not readily available since they are not found everywhere.”

That’s when Newtrace determined to make electrolysers that don’t use uncommon earth supplies or must be depending on the worldwide provide chain. The firm makes use of stainless-steel, plastic, and different supplies which might be accessible in India and globally, however not restricted to single sources.

Sarkar says, “Putting all the hydrogen companies together is still not enough to meet one single customer’s demand right now. They are all bottlenecked due to the supply chain constraint, however, we are looking to scale up gradually and meet some parts of the demand on a yearly basis, steadily replacing hydrogen production with green hydrogen.”

He provides, “Investment will not be a challenge, but technology will, as the order books for all the electrolyser manufacturers globally are full till 2026. Over the last two years, we addressed the technology challenge, and now we will focus on manufacturing. We will also be looking at local component suppliers for the plant such as valves and other hardware. We will be focusing on this and slowly scale up to manufacturing around 50 units a year in the next two years.”