Is Green Hydrogen the answer to the World’s Energy Needs: Multilateralism and Youth

Sailesh Singhal, on-ground reporting by Shrikant Gheesing& Sanjay Menon

ILead and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung came together with Youth For Green Hydrogen as a knowledge partner in hosting the second conference “Celebrating New India”, highlighting the international dimensions of a new emergent post-pandemic India. Itis a three-day study-cum-conference titled as “Multilateralism and Youth” from 27^th-29^th October, 2022. The three-day long field study-cum-conference experience will see an international amalgamation of new ideas, discussions on multilateral issues impacting global democracies and participation of 25 young politicians from Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia in this 75 years of India’s Independence.

With this conference, the aim is to take a step forward towards fostering a better understanding of new age energy opportunities, India’s leading role globally, cross cultural socio-political ecosystems and build focused political discussions on shared values, and current global challenges. This is an important step towards creating and reinforcing existing friendships through interactions with political leaders from across different states in India and the world.

Celebrating New India, brought the group of young socio-political leaders, academicians and research scholars coming from India and across the globe as well as practitioners and academia.

Of the 3 panel discussions, one of the panel revolved on addressing “Is Green Hydrogen the answer to the World’s Energy Needs?” with Mr. Hardeep Singh Puri, Hon. Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Government of India; Mr. Vineet Mittal, Chairman of Avaada Group; Mr. Sandeep Asolkar, Chairman of C-TEC and moderated by Author, Columnist and Anchor of Zee Group, Ms. Gaurie Dwivedi.

The panel brought interesting energy perspectives and the leading role of India in driving the Green Hydrogen Economy.

Minister Hardeep Singh Puri emphasized on the importance of Green hydrogen as the alternate source of energy. The increase the demand for green hydrogen as the demand will drive the Scalability and affordability, as the market forces will come into play. He said,” The development of a country is assessed by the amount of energy consumed by the country and India consumes 4 million barrels of oil per day hence it is a fast-growing economy.”

About the Sustainability of dependence on the traditional sources of energy he said,”The area of land on earth has never changed with the increase in population which has led to a constant struggle between mankind and nature over the years. Transfer from fossil fuel to green energy is the only solution to end this struggle.”

The Minister mentioned about the MOU signed with Singapore for producing green ammonia in a recent event in Tamil Nadu and many more such companies in India planning to sign MOUs with other countries. He further said,” technology has to play a key role in making the process of production of green hydrogen cheaper and scalable.”

“Green Hydrogen or Green energy is not only the panacea for energy but it also gives stability to the economy”, said Mr. Vineet Mittal, the Chairman of Avaada. Mentioning about the developments in Oil producing nations he said,”Saudi Arabia which produces 13 million barrel oil a day, has also started projects for green energy and India has been invited for same.”

Hon. Minister later invited people and CSOs to take action as talking alone will not make any difference to the current scenario and urged to develop a common standards for Green Hydrogen by inviting various stakeholders in accelerating the green energy revolution.

Mr. Sandeep Asolkar, Chairman, C-TEC, giving the example of successful solar in India said, “In the beginning solar too had faced challenges as it was costly and later it got cheaper hence the same future is awaiting green hydrogen”. He was very optimistic that green energy becoming popular in the coming days in India and around the world.

The event was sponsored by GAIL, ONGC and Oil India Limited, with World Intellectual Foundation being another knowledge partner. International Young Democrat Union as Global Partner and SaefXPay as Digital Banking Partner.

We are grateful to Green Hydrogen Organisation for their support and contributing in the panel discussion.