Monday, January 3, 2022

UP's Chief-minister-in-waiting has big plans for hydrogen

In a couple of months, there will be provincial elections in India's biggest state, Uttar Pradesh. It is expected to be a bi-polar affair, with two parties, the ruling BJP and the challenger, Samajwadi Party, vying for a majority of  the 403 seats.

BJP is pulling all stops but SP's chief, Akhilesh Yadav, who has a masters degreen in environmental engineering from the University of Sydney, Australia, seems to believe (genuinely) that he would be the next chief minister of the state.


                                                        Akhilesh Yadav


He is already making plans for state. Among them is one that is of interest to this blog and its readers.

Akhilesh Yadav has told the industry that he would build a Noida-Lucknow Hydrogen Zone. Noida lies in Uttar Pradesh, but adjuncts Delhi, so it is practically a Delhi - Lucknow hydrogen zone.

Yadav's plan is to put up hydrogen generating plants at several places, perhaps four or five, over the distance of about 512 km--so that a vehicle can ply on that route without fear of running out of gas. 

This blog hears that Yadav has already identified lands on which to put up hydrogen generating units. 

Who will put up these plants is not clear at the moment. Most probably, a few entrepreneurs will be selected through a bidding process. But what is more clear is that the plants are likely to be based on biomass, available aplenty at hand. Uttar Pradesh is an agricultural state.

In this, Yadav seems to have modeled his plans on other two similar hydrogen corridors -- the Delhi - Jaipur corridor which the Modi government is pushing and the Kolkata - Siliguri corridor, which the West Bengal chief minister, the redoubtable Mamata Banerjee, a political arch-rival of Prime Minister Modi, is keen to show as better than Modi's Delhi - Jaipur corridor. 

Well, green mobility is fast becoming a reality.

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