India’s best bet for energy transition to hydrogen is using biomass, which it has available in sizeable quantity, said Maurits Van Tol, CEO of Catalyst Technologies, a division of Johnson Matthey (JM) one of the global leaders in sustainable technologies
Maurits, who was in India for the recently concluded India Energy Week 2025, told businessline, “When you look at cleantech for India, there are a few things that that I would like to highlight. First of all, biomass. There is an enormously sizable agricultural sector in India, producing a lot of agricultural by-products and agricultural waste. What can be done is to gather all these agricultural residues and convert them using technology.”
“Secondly, India has a lot of sunshine and you also have the land to build large solar parks. And when you bring renewable electricity to scale, the prices will go down further and become very attractive, to produce hydrogen. Here again we have the technology to offer to convert electricity into green hydrogen,” he said adding that “you can produce renewable electricity at a low cost that means green hydrogen at an attractive price level.”
“India can boost the yields of biomass conversion into useful components, because biomass is oxygen rich. You can bring these industries to scale, not only for exports, but also to start to decarbonise,” he added.
Asked about what can be done on the policy front, he said, “One has to be clear about what energy transition process a country wants when working on the industrial policy. There is a component of subsidy which needs to be promoted.”
“The focus should be bringing together all resources – biomass, wind, solar and others. All promote decarbonisation and it helps in moving away from the dependence on fossil fuel,” he added.
“When you boost wind and solar, you have very attractive electricity prices , but also for the generation of low carbon hydrogen,” Maurits said adding that “you can combine low cost electricity and low carbon hydrogen from the onset.”
“In fact, when you scale up the output you will reduce the costs improve your competitive position and even create an export economy,” he said.
JM itself has been very active in India with a new engineering centre in Mumbai that designs plants for its customers, not only in India, but also for those all around the world.
Johnson Matthey, with revenues exceeding £12 billion, is at the forefront of solutions that advance net-zero ambitions. Maurits, at IEW participated in the panel discussion, “Heralding the Dawn of a Global Hydrogen Economy and Supply Chain”.
He believes India, with its growing influence in global energy and chemical industries, is central to the hydrogen economy’s development.
“Right now, most hydrogen is made by reforming natural gas – a process that creates so-called ‘grey hydrogen’. But this process also yields CO2, making it ripe for replacement. It’s more appropriate to talk about the carbon intensity of hydrogen, rather than just declare one colour to be environmentally better than another. The ease of the colour-naming convention tends to invite overly simplistic comparisons of hydrogen production routes. “
Both ‘blue’ and ‘green’ hydrogen have their place in energy transition, Maurits said.