A green fuel milestone just landed at one of India's busiest ports. On Saturday, September 26, 2026, the Chief Minister's Office of Assam announced that Assam Chief Minister Dr. Himanta Biswa Sarma, Union Minister for Ports, Shipping and Waterways Shri Sarbananda Sonowal, and Gujarat Chief Minister Shri Bhupendra Patel jointly laid the foundation stone for a 150 TPD (tonnes per day) E-Methanol Plant at Deendayal Port, Kandla, Gujarat — a project framed as a historic step in India's clean energy transition.

What an E-Methanol Plant at Kandla Actually Means

E-methanol — synthetic methanol produced using green hydrogen and captured carbon dioxide — is emerging as one of the most viable alternative marine fuels globally, offering a lower-emission substitute for conventional bunker fuel. A plant rated at 150 tonnes per day would make the Kandla facility a significant-scale pilot in an Indian port setting, directly feeding the maritime sector that sails in and out of Deendayal Port, which ranks among India's largest cargo hubs by volume.

The choice of Deendayal Port is deliberate. The port has already been earmarked for green fuel initiatives, and positioning an e-methanol plant there creates an immediate potential offtake market — ships that refuel at Kandla. That tight supply-to-demand loop is exactly what makes port-adjacent green fuel projects commercially viable, not just symbolically meaningful.

Three Governments, One Foundation Stone — The Political Architecture

The presence of leaders from Assam, Gujarat, and the Union government on a single dais at Kandla signals how deliberately this project has been constructed as a federal showcase. Sarbananda Sonowal, who holds the ports portfolio and previously served as Assam's Chief Minister before Himanta Biswa Sarma took the role in May 2021, brings direct ministerial authority over the port. Bhupendra Patel, Chief Minister of Gujarat since September 2021, anchors the state where the plant will physically stand. Sarma's presence extends the project's symbolic footprint beyond Gujarat, underlining that India's green energy ambitions are not regionally siloed.

Where This Fits in India's Green Fuel Architecture

India approved the National Green Hydrogen Mission in 2023, with e-methanol identified as one of the key downstream derivatives — a cleaner, storable carrier of green hydrogen for industrial and transport decarbonisation. The Kandla project slots directly into that mission's logic. It also runs parallel to the Sagarmala programme, the central government's long-running port modernisation initiative, which has increasingly incorporated green infrastructure mandates.

India's 2070 net-zero target demands that hard-to-abate sectors — maritime shipping among them — find credible fuel alternatives well before mid-century. Ports are the natural chokepoint: get green fuel production co-located with refuelling infrastructure, and the economics for ship operators improve sharply. The Kandla plant, if commissioned on schedule, would be one of the earliest large-scale demonstrations of that model on Indian soil.

What to watch now: the commissioning timeline, the technology partner behind the plant, and whether similar e-methanol or green ammonia facilities are announced at other major ports — signals that this is a replicable model, not a one-off ribbon-cutting.