Scheme Locks In 30,000 Tonnes of Refinery Green Hydrogen
Four sequential refinery tenders, not one auction, show India's green hydrogen price sliding toward global competitiveness, even as most of the contracted volume will not reach the grid before the end of the decade.
India's four state-run refiners have collectively contracted 30,000 tonnes a year of green hydrogen supply across four separate tenders awarded between July 2025 and February 2026. The clearing price across those tenders fell by roughly 30% over that span, from Rs 397 per kilogram to a record Rs 279 per kilogram, a decline confirmed in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha from Union Minister of State for New and Renewable Energy Shripad Yesso Naik in mid-August.
Why the Ministry Is Reporting This Now
The four awards were made individually by Indian Oil Corporation, Bharat Petroleum, Hindustan Petroleum and Numaligarh Refinery over an eighteen-month span. Naik's written reply aggregated them for the first time, framing them as evidence that the Strategic Interventions for Green Hydrogen Transition (SIGHT) Mode-2B scheme, which pools refinery demand into long-term, build-own-operate supply contracts, is doing what it was designed to do: give developers enough revenue certainty to bid down price over successive rounds. Refineries are India's largest domestic hydrogen buyers, currently relying on fossil-derived grey hydrogen for desulfurisation and hydrocracking.
A Falling Price Curve Across Four Tenders
Indian Oil's Panipat refinery in Haryana set the opening price in July 2025, awarding 10,000 tonnes a year to L&T Energy GreenTech at Rs 397 per kg on a 25-year supply agreement, using alkaline electrolysers built at L&T's own Hazira, Gujarat facility. Hindustan Petroleum's Visakhapatnam refinery and Bharat Petroleum's Bina refinery each awarded 5,000 tonnes a year to Ocior Energy at roughly Rs 387 per kg later in 2025. Numaligarh Refinery's 10,000-tonne tender, won by NeuEn Green Energy, a joint venture between Bharat Petroleum and Sembcorp Industries, cleared in February 2026 at Rs 279 per kg, the lowest price discovered in an Indian green hydrogen tender to date.
"This project reflects our end-to-end green energy capabilities," said Derek Shah, Head, Green Manufacturing & Development, L&T, on the Panipat award.
So What
A four-point price curve is a thin dataset, but the direction matters more than any single number: each successive SIGHT Mode-2B tender has cleared lower than the last, suggesting developers are pricing in falling renewable power costs and electrolyser costs as the programme matures. That is the signal other compliance buyers, and companies bidding into India's broader industrial decarbonisation pipeline, will be watching for benchmark pricing on their own offtake negotiations.
The volume figure requires a caveat the ministry's framing does not supply. Numaligarh's commercial operations are not expected before 2028, meaning a meaningful share of the 30,000-tonne total is contracted capacity years from delivery, not hydrogen flowing into refineries today. Whether Ocior Energy and NeuEn can hold their bid prices through construction and 25-year operation, given renewable power and electrolyser costs that have moved unpredictably before, remains untested.
What to Watch
Watch whether the next SIGHT Mode-2B tender clears below Rs 279 per kg, and whether any of the four awarded projects reaches financial close and construction start before the end of 2026.
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