IOCL chairman laments limited investment in energy innovations, commits to fund start-ups in hydrogen,mobility space

Indian Oil Corporation Ltd (IOCL) chairman A. S. Sahney | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement Indian Oil Corporation Ltd (IOCL) chairman A. S. Sahney on Thursday lamented about the minuscule investment going into energy innovation. “For all our strength as an energy nation, we have to address a very uncomfortable fact that energy innovation in India has received very less attention, very less capital than its importance demands,” Mr. Sahney told a gathering is start-up founders, academia and industry officials at the CSIR-National Chemicals Laboratory (NCL) in Pune. “In the last 5-6 years, barely 2% of India’s overall startup funding has come to energy sector. Of the total around ₹5.5 lakh crore that have gone into the startup ecosystem only ₹11,000 crore have gone to energy sector. And that is a pity. That situation needs to be corrected very quickly,” he emphasised at an event organised by MC² Foundation which has been set up with guidance from the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas to facilitate innovations in the energy sector. “And if we take out areas like solar, wind the funding comes down to less than ₹ 1,000 crore of the ₹5.5 lakh crore that have been spent,” he pointed out. He said innovation was important because what was happening to the energy market as a whole.Stating that India’s energy demand will double in the next 15 to 20 years, he said we need lots of innovations, lot of startups.“We need lot of people to come forward and contribute on how we can face this challenge of increasing energy demand in this situation which is very challenging by any standards,” he stated. Indian Oil Corporation has associated with incubation centre at CIST-NCL to fund and support start-ups working in the area of hydrogen and mobility. It will be working on hydrogen generation, hydrogen mobility, AI driven subsurface intelligence, next generation drilling for the upstream sector and bioenergy, compressed biogas. Each selected startup will receive up to Rs.50 lakhs in convertible funding. With the strongest startup to receive an additional Rs.1.5 crore at the demo day. The founders who will get access to the oil company’s R&D land will retain the complete ownership of their IP.“We only retain a non-exclusive, non-sub-licensable, royalty-free licence to use anonymised programmes. If we want to use your programme, we will use it in our systems so that it gives you more and more scalability,” Mr Sahney said. Delivering the keynote, Dr. R. A. Mashelkar, said hydrogen can been a bridge between renewable electricity, clean mobility, fertilizers and refining, he said hydrogen will succeed if it can become truly green and globally competitive. “That will require breakthrough technology in the entire value chain including efficient storage, low cost electrolysers, safe transportation, reliable infrastructure and demand creation which is very important,” he emphasised. The first accelerator of the MC² Foundation, MC²+ IGNITE will select up to 30 deep-tech start-ups across seven energy-transition themes - spanning hydrogen & mobility, AI-driven subsurface intelligence, next-generation drilling, bioenergy and compressed bio-gas, refinery process intensification, digital asset management and an open theme. Applications will be accepted till September 15,2026. (The writer was in Pune at the invitation of IOCL) Published - September 03, 2026 09:31 pm IST