Sentient Lab, a company incubated by KPIT Technologies Ltd, is in the process of licensing its bacteria-based hydrogen technology to other companies. In less than a year, several hydrogen production units would produce the gas from biomass with Sentient Lab’s technology, the company’s Chairman, Ravi Pandit, told Business Line today.
Recently, Sentient Labs unveiled the technology, which uses microbes to work on cellulosic biomass and produce hydrogen and methane; the methane would also be converted into hydrogen in a second step.
This, Pandit says, is more efficient than any other hydrogen generation technology in the country. Asked if this technology would make hydrogen available at $1 per kg, the holy grail of the hydrogen industry globally, Pandit said the cost may not be that low with Sentient Lab technology. However, it would be affordable, he said.
On Wednesday, Sentient Labs announced that it had developed fuel cells that can power buses in collaboration with the National Chemical Laboratories, Pune, a government-owned research lab. Sentient owns the intellectual property. Pandit said that many OEMs were interested in licensing that technology.
Pandit had earlier said that the cost of the fuel cell would be around $400 a kW, a third of the price of a comparable product in the market.
Asked to name the sources of cost-effectiveness, Pandit said that Sentient could do R&D very efficiently, at low costs. Secondly, a lot of components were developed in-house.
“This is the first time that any company in India has done a fuel cell completely ground-up, without any foreign collaboration,” he said. “We you do something ground-up, you not only get know-how, but also know-why,” he said.
The inherent cost advantage of being fully indigenous would only be strengthened by scale. And scale would happen because of the tremendous demand. Sentient Lab’s fuel cell is suitable to be fitted on to railways and ships—indeed, it works well in any long-distance mobility scenario.
Answering a question, Pandit said that Sentient Labs was working on other technologies for producing hydrogen, including electrolysis and pyrolysis.