Adani New Industries, the manufacturing and green hydrogen platform of the Adani Group, has signed a development and licensing agreement with Melbourne-based hydrogen technology company Cavendish Renewable Technology (CRT).

The agreement includes infrastructure costs for intellectual property development, license fees, and royalties on the successful commercialization of CRT’s electrolyzer technologies.

Adani is currently setting up a vertically integrated 5 GW electrolyzer manufacturing plant in India. The electrolyzer gigafactory is crucial to Adani Group’s plan to invest $70 billion by 2030 in green technologies and projects.

CRT’s Chief Executive Officer, Ani Kulkarni, said, “It is going to be a golden era for hydrogen over the next decade, and CRT is excited to receive such a significant contract from Adani. We believe this contract would underpin clean technology collaborations between two key economies in the APAC region.”

Adani New Industries has selected CRT as a technology partner for developing green hydrogen electrolyzer technologies to meet the increasing demand in India and the Middle East-North Africa region. With the partnership, CRT can accelerate its research activities and shorten the commercialization pathway of hydrogen electrolyzers.

The partnership would cover the development of alkaline electrolyzers (AEL), polymer exchange membranes (PEM), anion exchange membranes (AEM), and CRT’s innovative ‘C Cell’ technology for mass-scale production. CRT plans to establish a pilot manufacturing plant in early 2024 for AEM electrolyzer production.

CRT’s “C-Cell” is an early-stage approach with the potential to improve the efficiency of alkaline water electrolysis. Using a combination of powdered metallurgy techniques and catalyst coating methods, the C-Cell design eliminates the need for intricate machining.

The company said its PEM and AEL electrolyzer stack designs are simple, scalable, and tailored for mass production with reduced time and machining cost. It has also developed a proprietary low-cost electrode fabrication process for catalyst-coated substrates, which is suitable for manufacturing at scale with established industrial processes.

The partnership works in tandem with India’s National Hydrogen Mission to help make the country a global green hydrogen hub.

India announced its Green Hydrogen Policy early this year, aiming to produce 5 million tons of green hydrogen by 2030 and the related development of renewable energy capacity.

In July, French oil and gas major TotalEnergies announced that it signed an agreement with Adani Enterprises to acquire a 25% interest in Adani New Industries to produce and commercialize green hydrogen in India.