SECI Director Sanjay Sharma © FICCI India/YouTube

• Sanjay Sharma, Director of the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI), told delegates at the Bharat Green Hydrogen Summit in New Delhi that India has agreed to hold a joint H2Global green-hydrogen-derivatives auction with Germany — with similar tender agreements due to be signed with the Netherlands and Japan in the coming months.
• Separately, and distinct from the H2Global news, Sharma confirmed SECI's own domestic tender for 500,000 tonnes a year of green hydrogen-based methanol is in the "final stages" of documentation, with finalisation expected within two months.

The H2Global News: From MoU to Actual Joint Auctions

This is the more structurally significant announcement, and it marks a real escalation from where India-Germany hydrogen cooperation stood previously. Back in November 2024, SECI signed a memorandum of understanding with Germany's H2Global Stiftung — at the time, explicitly framed as a knowledge-exchange arrangement: sharing insights on tender design, market mechanisms, and trade logistics, with the stated hope that it "may" eventually lead to joint tenders. What Sharma announced at the Bharat Green Hydrogen Summit is the concrete next step beyond that: India has now agreed to actually hold a joint auction with Germany under the H2Global mechanism, with equivalent arrangements due to be signed with the Netherlands and Japan in the coming months.

For readers unfamiliar with it, H2Global is worth explaining properly, because the mechanism itself is the interesting part. It's a "double auction" model, run through a German-backed intermediary called HintCo: on the supply side, HintCo runs a competitive global tender to buy green hydrogen derivatives on long-term contracts (typically around 10 years) from whichever producer offers the lowest price; on the demand side, it resells that same product to European buyers on shorter-term contracts at a lower, market-competitive price.

The German government (and increasingly the EU) covers the gap between what HintCo pays producers and what it charges buyers. The mechanism exists specifically to solve green hydrogen's core chicken-and-egg financing problem: producers need long-term price certainty to secure project financing, but buyers won't sign expensive long-term contracts when spot-market alternatives are cheaper.

H2Global's first pilot tender, concluded in August 2024, went to Fertiglobe (a joint venture between OCI N.V. and ADNOC) for renewable ammonia — a contract worth up to €397 million, priced at €1,000 per tonne delivered to Europe against a net resale price of €811 per tonne, with deliveries starting in 2027 and building to roughly 397,000 tonnes cumulative by 2033.

India agreeing to run a joint auction with Germany under this framework means Indian green hydrogen and derivative producers would now be able to bid directly into that same double-auction structure — competing for exactly the kind of subsidised, bankable long-term offtake that made Fertiglobe's original deal possible.

Extending the same arrangement to the Netherlands and Japan would open India's producers to three of the most credible hydrogen-importing markets in the world simultaneously, using a mechanism that's already proven it can produce a real, signed, financeable contract rather than just a policy framework.

The Separate News: India's Own Domestic Methanol Tender

Distinct from the H2Global development, Sharma also confirmed that SECI's domestic tender for 500,000 tonnes a year of green hydrogen-based methanol is in the "final stages" of completing its documentation, with finalisation expected within the next two months.

This tender has its own history worth understanding. It was opened in May 2026 under India's Strategic Interventions for Green Hydrogen Transition (SIGHT) programme — the National Green Hydrogen Mission's primary support mechanism — marking SIGHT's first green-methanol-specific procurement round. Structured as 10-year, cost-based competitive contracts, it requires bidders to produce methanol from green hydrogen (from co-located renewable assets, remote renewable plants, third-party power purchase agreements, or power exchanges) combined with captured carbon dioxide.

SECI acts as the intermediary buyer, purchasing from producers and reselling onward to procurers across the Indian domestic market — a structure that mirrors, in miniature, exactly the kind of demand-aggregation role H2Global's HintCo plays internationally, just aimed at India's own domestic industrial buyers rather than European ones.

This methanol tender follows SECI's earlier and larger green ammonia procurement round: a 739,000 tonnes-per-year tender issued in June 2024 under the same SIGHT programme, aimed at supplying 14 domestic fertiliser plants (later widened to demand aggregation from 13 units, per the parliamentary disclosure we covered separately this week).

That ammonia tender has already produced at least one concrete, signed outcome — renewables firm Jakson Green finalised an 85,000 tonnes-per-year green ammonia purchase agreement after winning a SECI supply auction in 2025 — though it also reportedly drew criticism over bidding prices viewed by some market participants as too high, a genuine friction point worth noting rather than glossing over.

Source:   FCW Team