India has expanded its green hydrogen transport pilots from 37 to 70 vehicles and its refuelling footprint from nine to 16 stations along highway corridors, according to Hydrogen Fuel News. The national initiative targets 45 to 50 trial vehicles in the field by 2026, scaling to between 400 and 500 operating units by 2030. Field data gathered from parallel trials of fuel-cell and hydrogen combustion powertrains will be used to steer future policy, industrial expansion, and corridor infrastructure planning.

Refuelling Architecture and Station Utilization

For hydrogen infrastructure developers, deploying 16 refuelling stations to support an initial fleet of 70 vehicles yields an exceptionally low vehicle-to-station ratio. Across multi-station corridor networks, an average of fewer than five vehicles per station presents severe capital utilization challenges. In early pilot phases, station demand is intermittent, which heavily influences the choice between on-site electrolysis and centralized supply logistics.

Plant engineers must evaluate the trade-offs inherent to these low initial off-take volumes:

• On-site generation penalties: Installing small-scale electrolysers directly at corridor forecourts leads to low capacity factors and prolonged idle states. Frequent thermal cycling and cold starts can degrade cell stacks, accelerate membrane wear, and reduce overall system efficiency.
• Centralized off-site production: Sourcing hydrogen from a centralized production plant delivered via high-pressure tube trailers avoids under-utilized electrolyser capital expenditure at remote stations. However, it requires robust logistics and high-pressure cascade unloading systems on site.
• Dispensing and buffer storage: Stations serving heavy-duty trucks and buses require high-pressure buffer storage banks and compression units capable of handling back-to-back fills without excessive pressure drops or thermal delays.

Balance-of-Plant Divergence: Fuel Cells Versus Combustion

The decision to conduct dual trials using both fuel-cell electric vehicles and hydrogen internal combustion engines introduces distinct technical requirements for gas clean-up and dispensing hardware. The source material does not specify station-level purity metrics, but well-established industry standards impose radically different requirements on these two powertrain architectures.

Proton-exchange membrane fuel cells require ultra-high hydrogen purity to prevent irreversible platinum catalyst poisoning. For plant designers, this necessitates multi-stage downstream balance-of-plant hardware, including catalytic deoxypurification units to eliminate trace oxygen and pressure swing adsorption units to scrub carbon compounds, sulfur, and moisture. Real-time purity monitoring instruments must also be integrated upstream of the dispenser to prevent contamination of vehicle fuel cells.

Conversely, hydrogen combustion engines operate with significantly higher tolerance for trace impurities. If corridor stations are required to serve both vehicle types from a shared infrastructure, operators face a design fork: either treat all dispensed hydrogen to fuel-cell grade specifications, which inflates the capital and operating costs of the purification skid, or construct segregated purification and dispensing streams, which increases piping complexity and equipment footprint.

Upstream Engineering Demands for 2030 Scale

Transitioning from the initial fleet to between 400 and 500 vehicles by 2030 will shift the infrastructure requirement from distributed demonstration testing to continuous baseload production. Although specific corridor capacities have not been disclosed, this volume of heavy commercial transport will require significant expansions in upstream plant utilities.

Plant developers must plan for continuous multi-megawatt power conditioning capable of mitigating harmonic distortion caused by large rectifier systems feeding water electrolysers. Furthermore, scaling production across highway corridors will demand dedicated water treatment facilities. Stacks require demineralized water of high resistivity, requiring multi-stage reverse osmosis and electrodeionization systems. Managing feed-water sourcing, water recovery ratios, and brine disposal along major transport corridors will be critical design factors as fleet sizes increase toward the 2030 target.

Source

This analysis was written from reporting by Hydrogen Fuel News: Hydrogen vehicles: India ramps up green hydrogen infrastructure for buses and trucks, published 01 October 2026. Figures and events above are as reported there; the engineering commentary is ours.