According to Chief Executive Officer Arun Misra, Hindustan Zinc Ltd. has begun a $1 billion green transition to replace underground vehicles powered by fossil fuels in mines over the next five years. According to CEO Arun Misra, the two underground electric vehicles (EV) that have been launched so far are auxiliary equipment, but the four that will be released this year will be production equipment. 

The replacement makes sense from a financial standpoint as well as from a green environment viewpoint since it lowers maintenance costs, according to the full-time director. 

“Every year, the company spends around $200–250 million to replace old mining vehicles and equipment. Therefore, wherever the technology will support, HZL will replace the underground vehicles with EV over the next five years.” - Arun Misra

Green hydrogen as a fuel, according to Misra, was still some time away from being used commercially. The corporation might also look at putting up the hydrogen manufacturing facility at the site as HZL is used in the process of electrolysis for manufacture of zinc. The main difficulty is that in order to utilize hydrogen, the furnaces must be modified, Arun Misra further added. 

"If the hydrogen infrastructure for generation, distribution and utilisation in vehicles happens before, we will use them in vehicles. Till then, EV is the way forward." - Arun Misra 

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