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New Delhi, March 13: A fleet of 15 Delhi auto-rickshaws running on hydrogen gas may soon give India its first hydrogen-energy public transport project.

The three-wheelers, which will ferry passengers from a Metro station to the international trade fair grounds here, symbolise a shift to clean energy at a time thousands of Calcutta autos, running on the banned katatel, foul up the Bengal capital’s air.

The Unido International Centre for Hydrogen Energy Technology in Istanbul, Turkey, yesterday pledged $500,000 to kick-start hydrogen-fuelled public transport vehicles in India.

The hydrogen-fuelled autos, jointly developed by IIT Delhi and carmaker Mahindra and Mahindra’s research centre in Nashik, will run on compressed hydrogen gas, releasing only water vapour and oxides of nitrogen in their exhaust streams.

The first set of three-wheelers is likely to be handed over for field tests to the India Trade Promotion Organisation, the agency that manages the trade fair complex, within the next 12 to 15 months. This was revealed by Mathew Abraham, general manager of alternate fuel and advanced technologies with Mahindra and Mahindra.

Each vehicle will have a cylinder containing 1kg of compressed hydrogen gas that will allow it to travel up to 95km, said Lalit Mohan Das, professor at IIT Delhi’s Centre for Energy Studies, the co-ordinator for the project.

“We’ve been dreaming of hydrogen-based public transport for nearly 25 years,” Das said. “We’ve chosen three-wheelers for this project because they represent the most common mode of public transport across the country.”

The new project will support hydrogen-fuelled vehicles for two years. Unido officials said they hoped it would establish the feasibility and advantages of hydrogen in public transport and allow the technology to spread to other cities.

A US-based company with expertise in hydrogen safety and supply strategy will provide the hydrogen fuel for the autos. Project officials said the compressed hydrogen gas would be procured through international tenders.

India’s ministry of new and renewable energy has supported research on hydrogen-fuelled vehicles for more than two decades.

In the late 1990s, physicists at Banaras Hindu University’s Institute of Technology had demonstrated hydrogen power for two-wheeler motorbikes.

But the BHU-IT technology relied on metallic hydrides as fuel instead of compressed hydrogen gas.

Metallic hydrides have lower storage capacity than compressed hydrogen gas, Abraham said. With metallic hydrides, he said, one needs fuel units of larger weight and volume compared with compressed hydrogen gas.

The Telegraph, 13.03.09