HMEL, IIT Kanpur partner to Develop AI-Driven, Sustainable Energy Tech

HPCL-Mittal Energy Limited (HMEL) and Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur) have a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to collaborate on developing new energy technologies. The agreement represents a movement to practical, research-informed innovation in India's energy industry.

The MoU, signed at HMEL's corporate office in Noida, establishes a partnership that focuses on applied research in the areas of sustainable energy, advanced materials, process optimisation, and AI-based energy systems. The goal is to now take academic research and translate the understanding into commercially viable products in the energy sector, where the research was previously solely theoretical in nature.

The collaboration is indicative of the emergence in India's developing energy sector where academic institutions and industries are beginning to collaborate to tackle a number of practical challenges. HMEL will be concentrating on taking the research outcomes and scaling them into technologies that can be applied in an actual industrial setting.

In the statement, the collaboration is looking for projects with direct industrial application, including clean energy, carbon management and digital optimisation of refinery operations.

HMEL has filed a number of patents previously and asserts that the company has a greater level of commercial adoption of its research than any other oil company in Canada. Continued collaboration in partnership with academics at the start of the innovation process will help strengthen that pathway.

Based on IIT Kanpur’s academic competencies and HMEL's industry exposure both organizations have aspirations of a co-development approach to deploying technologies to support national sustainability and energy security goals.