SECI Opens 500,000-Tonne Green Methanol Tender Under SIGHT: First Tranche Targets Shipping Decarbonisation

Key Highlights

• The Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) launched a tender on 6 May 2026 for production and supply of 500,000 tonnes per annum of green methanol under the SIGHT programme of the National Green Hydrogen Mission.
• The tender is structured as cost-based competitive bidding under the first tranche of SIGHT for green methanol. Bids open on 8 June 2026.
• Only companies setting up new production facilities are eligible to apply for incentives under the scheme. Existing methanol operations are not eligible.
• The Green Methanol Purchase Agreement (GMPA) is structured as a 10-year offtake commitment from SECI, providing the long-tenor revenue visibility required for project financing.
• The tender follows MNRE's March 2026 notification of the Green Methanol Standard (≤0.44 kg CO2eq per kg) under the GHCI framework, completing the regulatory-plus-offtake pairing for the segment.

What SECI Launched

SECI, under the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), is the designated nodal agency for the National Green Hydrogen Mission. On 6 May 2026, SECI issued a Request for Selection (RfS) for the production and supply of 500,000 tonnes per annum of green methanol. The tender opens on 8 June 2026 when sealed bids will be evaluated.

The mechanism is identical in structure to the SIGHT Mode-2A green ammonia tranches that ran through 2025: cost-based competitive bidding, fixed-incentive support to selected bidders, and a long-tenor purchase agreement from SECI as the central offtaker. The Green Methanol Purchase Agreement (GMPA) runs for 10 years.

Eligibility is restricted to companies setting up new production facilities. The intent is to drive greenfield capacity for green methanol rather than subsidising conversion of existing brownfield methanol assets.

Why Green Methanol Now

The launch closes a gap that had been visible in the NGHM scheme since SIGHT Mode-2A green ammonia auctions began. Green ammonia had a clear offtake channel through the fertiliser sector and an established SIGHT auction track record. Green methanol, despite being technically eligible under the broader Mission scope, lacked both a discovery mechanism and a clear domestic offtake pathway.

The 8 May 2026 timing pairs naturally with the regulatory work MNRE finalised earlier in 2026:

1. GHCI Green Methanol standard notified in March 2026: ≤0.44 kg CO2eq per kg methanol, aligned with the broader 2.0 kg CO2eq per kg threshold for upstream hydrogen.
2. GHCI Green Ammonia standard notified in parallel: ≤0.38 kg CO2eq per kg ammonia.
3. Water emissions draft guidelines issued February 2026, aligned with ISO 19870:2023.

With the certification framework in place and a 500,000-tonne demand signal from SECI, the green methanol segment now has both compliance architecture and an offtake mechanism. That is the same pairing that turned green ammonia from a research topic into a SIGHT-bid market in 2024-25.

Shipping and Industrial Decarbonisation as the Target Demand

SECI's mandate under MNRE explicitly names shipping and industrial decarbonisation as the demand-side drivers. Three pull factors converge here:

• International maritime decarbonisation requirements. The IMO's revised emission reduction targets and the EU's FuelEU Maritime regulation (entered into force January 2025) create direct demand for low-carbon shipping fuels, with green methanol as one of the leading candidates.
• Indian industrial methanol consumption. Methanol is a primary feedstock for formaldehyde, acetic acid, MTBE, and related chemicals. Domestic substitution of imported grey methanol with greenfield green methanol creates a parallel offtake stream alongside maritime demand.
• Hub program alignment. The restructured Green Hydrogen Hubs program (Deendayal Port, Paradip, and V.O. Chidambaranar Port) is port-anchored, which directly aligns with maritime-fuel offtake. Green methanol produced at port hubs can be loaded into bunker vessels with minimal additional logistics.

What to Watch in the Bidding Window

Three threads bear watching between the 6 May launch and the 8 June bid opening:

1. Price discovery. SIGHT Mode-2A green ammonia auctions closed at approximately ₹49.75 per kg in their lowest-priced tranche (around 10 percent above grey ammonia parity). The green methanol price benchmark will be a critical signal for whether the SIGHT incentive design carries over to methanol economics.
2. Bidder composition. Whether SIGHT Mode-2A green ammonia winners (ACME, AM Green, ReNew, NTPC, IOCL, BPCL among others) also bid for methanol capacity, or whether new methanol-specialist players emerge.
3. Capacity sub-tranches. The 500,000-tonne aggregate may be allocated across multiple smaller projects (as happened in Mode-2A) or concentrated in fewer larger awards. The structure will signal how MNRE views optimal project scale for the segment.

GHCI Certification Implications

All green methanol awarded under this tender will require GHCI certification to monetise the SIGHT incentive. That places these projects on the same compliance timeline as the green ammonia and pure green hydrogen producers already navigating the BEE accreditation queue.

The Green Methanol Standard (≤0.44 kg CO2eq per kg) is independent of the upstream Green Hydrogen Standard (≤2.0 kg CO2eq per kg H2), but the methanol synthesis pathway is downstream of green hydrogen production. A project producing green methanol from green hydrogen needs to certify both the upstream H2 against the 2.0 kg threshold and the downstream CH3OH against the 0.44 kg threshold. The certification work compounds rather than substitutes.

For projects intending export beyond domestic SIGHT offtake, the EU's Renewable Energy Directive (RED III) treatment of renewable methanol opens an additional certification track that overlaps with but does not duplicate GHCI. RFNBO-equivalent methanol certification under CertifHy or ISCC may be relevant for shipping-fuel buyers in the EU and UK.

HyGOAT Implications

The methanol tender adds a third concrete certification track to the Indian developer's compliance map, alongside green hydrogen and green ammonia. Each track has its own emission threshold, its own production pathway, and its own downstream offtaker requirements. For developers bidding into the 8 June window, the screening question is not "does this project meet the GHCI threshold for hydrogen", it is "does this project meet the cascade of thresholds for hydrogen, ammonia or methanol, and any downstream export certification framework that the offtaker demands".

That cascade is precisely the kind of multi-gate compliance question that benefits from structured pre-bid assessment, not post-award scrambling.