India’s Hydrogen Power Play

Hydrogen-powered turbines could help India decarbonise electricity, industry and eventually aviation but formidable challenges remain.

Hydrogen has acquired the status of energy’s favourite future tense. It promises clean industrial heat, low-carbon electricity and, eventually, cleaner aviation. Yet hydrogen is not simply natural gas with a greener label. It behaves differently in a turbine, burns faster, ignites more readily and creates its own engineering hazards. That makes the emergence of hydrogen gas turbines a technological gamble with potentially large rewards for countries such as India.

A hydrogen gas turbine (HGT) is, at its simplest, a gas-turbine power system designed to burn hydrogen, either blended with natural gas or, in more advanced configurations, as pure hydrogen. When hydrogen is produced using renewable electricity, its combustion does not release carbon dioxide at the point of use. That makes HGTs potentially useful in electricity generation and, in the longer term, propulsion.

Volatile Fuel

But hydrogen is an unruly fuel. Compared with methane, it has a much shorter ignition-delay time and a substantially higher flame speed. It also has greater thermal diffusivity and a much wider flammability range. Those properties can make combustion more efficient, but they also complicate the design of the combustion chamber. Flashback, or the movement of a flame back into the burner, is one of the risks. Hydrogen’s combustion characteristics can also increase nitrogen-oxide emissions, an awkward contradiction for a technology marketed as environmentally friendly.

The lighter molecular weight of hydrogen adds another complication. Storage, transportation, leakage prevention and fuel-system design require different engineering approaches from those used for natural gas. In other words, putting hydrogen into an existing turbine is not merely a matter of changing the fuel nozzle.

That is why advanced combustion technologies such as Dry Low Emission (DLE) and Dry Low NOx (DLN) systems are becoming central to hydrogen-turbine development. The engineering challenge is to control a fuel that is simultaneously highly reactive and potentially difficult to contain while keeping combustion stable and emissions low.

The prize, however, is substantial. HGTs come in several forms: heavy-duty turbines for large power stations, aero-derivative turbines that offer faster and more modular power generation, and microturbines for distributed-energy applications. Their greatest strategic advantage may be that they can provide dispatchable electricity. Wind and solar are cheap and increasingly abundant, but they are intermittent. Hydrogen turbines could act as a bridge between variable renewable generation and a power grid that cannot afford to switch off when the sun sets or the wind stops.

Technological Race

The United States has made significant advances in hydrogen combustion, particularly in aero-derivative engines and large industrial turbines. Several manufacturers have demonstrated turbines capable of operating on very high concentrations of hydrogen, including configurations designed for 100 percent hydrogen combustion. The progress is important, but it would be premature to declare the problem solved. Operating a turbine on hydrogen under controlled conditions is one thing; producing, storing and supplying sufficient quantities of affordable green hydrogen while maintaining low NOx emissions is quite another.

China has also moved aggressively from laboratory research towards industrial demonstration. Its Jupiter-1 unit, a 30-megawatt pure-hydrogen gas turbine, has been deployed in Inner Mongolia as part of a national hydrogen pilot project. The significance goes beyond the turbine itself. A commercially relevant pure-hydrogen power unit represents a step towards testing whether hydrogen can move from an experimental fuel to an element of the power system.

India cannot afford to watch this race from the sidelines. The country has already established the National Green Hydrogen Mission, with a target of producing 5m tonnes of green hydrogen a year by 2030. The broader objective is to build an ecosystem around electrolyser manufacturing, renewable-powered hydrogen production, industrial consumption and exports. Government incentives and mandated consumption in selected sectors are intended to create demand as well as supply.

Indian companies have begun testing the waters. GAIL has explored hydrogen blending in city-gas networks, while NTPC has initiated projects involving green-hydrogen blending in PNG networks. Such experiments may appear modest beside the giant turbines being developed elsewhere, but they matter because hydrogen economies are built incrementally. Production, storage, pipelines, burners and end-use technologies must develop together.

Aviation is among the hardest sectors to decarbonise because batteries remain poorly suited to powering large aircraft over long distances. Hydrogen offers a radically different possibility. If used directly in an aircraft turbine, it could eliminate in-flight carbon dioxide emissions, although the overall environmental benefit would depend critically on how the hydrogen itself is produced and on managing other emissions, including NOx and contrails.

India’s private sector has already begun moving into this field. Tata Consultancy Services and Rolls-Royce have collaborated on hydrogen propulsion research, demonstrating the operation of a modern aero gas turbine across a simulated flight cycle using 100 percent hydrogen. The demonstration covered the equivalent of take-off, cruise and landing and tested technologies involving combustion, fuel systems and engine controls.

That achievement is significant because aviation exposes every weakness in hydrogen technology. An aircraft engine cannot tolerate unstable combustion, unreliable fuel delivery or excessive weight. Nor can an airline build its business around a fuel that is prohibitively expensive or unavailable at airports.

The danger is that hydrogen becomes another fashionable technology in which announcements grow faster than infrastructure. The opportunity is to make it a strategic industrial capability.

Hydrogen gas turbines will not replace solar, wind, batteries or conventional gas turbines overnight. Nor are they automatically carbon-free. Their value is that they could provide firm power when renewables cannot, help decarbonise difficult industrial applications and eventually open a pathway towards cleaner aviation.

For India, therefore, the hydrogen turbine is a test of whether the country can turn its green-hydrogen ambitions into indigenous engineering capability and convert a difficult fuel into a strategic advantage.

(The author is a retired naval aviation officer and a defence and geopolitical analyst. Views personal.)