Billionaire Ambani Touts Clean Energy as New Growth Engine

(Bloomberg) -- Reliance Industries Ltd.’s nascent clean energy business is poised to reach the size of today’s oil-to-chemicals operation within seven years, Chairman Mukesh Ambani said.

The oil-to-chemicals business at Jamnagar in Gujarat, which includes automobile fuels as well as a range of petrochemicals, accounted for more than half of the company’s 10 trillion rupees ($119 billion) revenue in the year through March. The group’s first clean energy manufacturing facility, expected to start operations at the end of the year, will be a 10 gigawatts solar PV factory.

“Our new energy business will be the new jewel in Reliance’s crown,” Ambani, Asia’s richest person, said in his annual address to shareholders. The rapid growth would be bolstered by supply deals with the conglomerate’s carbon intensive branches, which are seeking to clean up their operations.

A 30 gigawatt-hour battery plant is expected to start output by the second half of next year, Ambani said.

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The company aims to build and enable capabilities to produce 100 gigawatts of renewable power by 2030, a part of which would be used for the production of green hydrogen, the company has said previously. 

As the group tilts increasingly toward clean energy, its conventional refining business is undergoing a transformation too, in line with its 2035 net-zero ambitions. 

Even as India’s state-owned refiners are expanding capacity to produce diesel and gasoline, Ambani is pivoting the world’s largest refining complex to produce just jet fuel and petrochemicals as he expects batteries and other alternate fuels to erode demand for liquid transport fuel in coming years.   

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