The Indian government is committed to allocating higher subsidies for use of green hydrogen by the domestic steel industry from the current corpus of $54.7 million, Indian minister for new and renewable energy R K Singh said on Friday, January 26.
Steelmaking, which accounts for seven percent of global emissions and around 12 percent of emission in the case of India, currently depends on coal-fired blast furnaces to smelt iron ore. However, hydrogen can be used to directly reduce iron ore, which can then be processed through electric arc furnaces run on clean power to produce green steel with near zero emissions.
It may be noted that, while the government has announced the corpus available to subsidise hydrogen pilot plants set up by steel mills, the mode of disbursement of funds is yet to be framed.
JSW Steel Limited had last year announced plans to build a 3,800 mt per year capacity green hydrogen plant in the central state of Rajasthan and to supply hydrogen to its Vijayanagar steel mill in the southern state of Karnataka.
“If we use green hydrogen, then carbon content becomes very low and we need to think of ways and means to do so on a larger scale in the steel industry. Funding is not a constraint and projects eligible will get adequate support from the government and the subsidy corpus will be increased if needed,” Singhs said.