India Launches Green Hydrogen Certification Portal: GHCI Moves from Scheme to Compliance Infrastructure

Key Highlights

• India launched a Green Hydrogen Certification Portal on June 18, 2026, under the Green Hydrogen Certification Scheme of India.
• The launch was paired with a broader National Green Hydrogen Mission execution update covering state policies, electrolyser manufacturing, refinery offtake, steel pilots, mobility pilots, testing facilities, and green ammonia.
• Six states have notified dedicated green hydrogen policies, four are finalising policies, and seven have integrated hydrogen into existing industrial or renewable energy frameworks.
• Incentives have been awarded to 15 companies for 3,000 MW per year of indigenous electrolyser manufacturing capacity.
• Agreements have been signed for 6.7 lakh MTPA of green ammonia supply to 11 fertiliser plants.

What Happened

Union Minister for New and Renewable Energy Pralhad Joshi launched India's Green Hydrogen Certification Portal during a national workshop on strengthening the National Green Hydrogen Mission.

The portal is meant to support transparent certification and regulatory compliance under GHCI. The launch follows India's recent work on the certification scheme itself and on standards for green ammonia and green methanol.

The policy signal came with an implementation dashboard. Reported execution markers include 3,000 MW per year of electrolyser manufacturing incentives, 30,000 MTPA of green hydrogen supply contracts for state-run oil refiners, Rs 84 crore for steel-sector pilots testing 100 percent hydrogen injection, nearly Rs 208 crore for 37 hydrogen-fuelled vehicles and nine refuelling stations, and more than Rs 193 crore across seven national testing facilities.

The ammonia signal is also material: agreements for 6.7 lakh MTPA of green ammonia supply to 11 fertiliser plants.

Why It Matters

The market implication is that GHCI is becoming operational. Until now, many developers could treat certification as a framework to monitor while project economics matured. A portal changes that posture. Once the certification workflow becomes digital, repeatable, and visible, producers need to prepare for actual evidence submission.

That preparation is not cosmetic. Certification readiness touches:

• renewable electricity procurement records;
• electrolyser and plant-level production data;
• water and energy inputs;
• lifecycle emissions assumptions;
• chain-of-custody documentation;
• verifier-ready audit trails.

For Indian developers, the portal also increases the cost of late evidence design. If a project waits until commissioning to structure data capture, gaps become expensive to fix.

HyGOAT Read

India's certification portal is a domestic compliance milestone, but it should not be confused with export readiness.

GHCI can create a credible domestic certification pathway. EU RFNBO eligibility still requires additionality, temporal correlation, geographic correlation, lifecycle GHG accounting, and proof that the renewable electricity claim holds under EU rules. Japan and Korea can introduce different evidence expectations again.

That is why HyGOAT treats GHCI as one layer in a multi-framework evidence model, not the whole model. The right design question for producers is:

"Can the same project data satisfy GHCI today and keep the door open for RFNBO, JCM, buyer audits, and tender-specific checks tomorrow?"

The portal launch makes that question more urgent.

What to Watch

Three items now matter:

1. The first live certification submissions through the portal and the evidence format they require.
2. Whether GHCI data outputs are structured in a way that can be mapped to RFNBO and other export frameworks.
3. How quickly state-level hydrogen policies align incentives, land, power banking, renewable procurement, and certification workflows.

For producers, the lesson is direct: certification readiness is now an operational workstream.

Source: Times of India.