There is no financing problem here yet. There is an offtake problem wearing one.

India has a mission, a production standard, an incentive programme and a great deal of announced capacity. What it does not yet have in volume is signed, priced, long-dated offtake — and until a project has that, nothing a lender does with the rest of the file matters.

What does get financed is narrow: a plant with a contracted industrial buyer replacing hydrogen it currently makes from natural gas, or an export contract standing behind a derivative such as ammonia. Outside those, the money that has moved has moved on sponsors’ balance sheets — corporate finance with a hydrogen project attached. That is a legitimate route, and it should be called by its name at the start rather than discovered in month nine.

What kills green hydrogen deals

Everything below is a way of not having a buyer, or of having one whose commitment does not reach as far as the debt does.

A memorandum where an offtake contract should be

Non-binding, volume-indicative, silent on price — arriving as the answer to the only question that matters. The file moves down the pile without a refusal ever being issued.

An offtake that expires inside the amortisation

It leaves the lender holding merchant risk on a molecule with no traded price, and nothing else in the structure fixes it.

A price with nothing behind it

The buyer’s alternative costs it a number it knows precisely. A contract above that needs a mandate, a premium its customers will pay, or an incentive that outlasts the negotiation.

Building for the wrong standard

The plant qualifies under MNRE’s Green Hydrogen Standard and the European buyer’s contract references a stricter one. The power contracts that would have satisfied it were signed two years earlier, and nobody will reopen them.

The stack replacement nobody funded

A mid-life capital event inside the tenor with no reserve. It is a covenant breach with a date already on it, and lenders find it in the first read.

Scoped to the announcement

A smaller first phase matched to a real contract is financeable; the number in the press release is not. Refusing to shrink is the commonest reason a viable project never starts.

Questions we answer in the first conversation

None of these are technology questions, and every one decides whether a file is worth starting.

• What does the buyer’s alternative cost it today, and what floor does that put under the price?
• Which standard does the offtake contract reference, and do the power contracts already signed satisfy it?
• What tenor will this buyer genuinely sign, and what first phase does that tenor support?
• What does the model look like in year four, after the SIGHT taper ends?
• Is an export credit agency available on this equipment, and was it considered before the supplier was chosen?

How we take these on

We engage at the offtake rather than after it, which makes the early work commercial before it is financial: what the buyer’s alternative costs it today, which standard its contract will reference, what tenor it will genuinely sign, and what first phase that tenor supports. Where the answer is that the project is not financeable at its announced size, we would rather say so in the first meeting than after a year of arranging.