Why the burner is being redesigned at all

The number behind every technology in this piece is import dependence. India consumed roughly 31 to 33 million tonnes of LPG in 2025-26 and imports somewhere between 60 and 67 per cent of it, depending on which government or industry figure is used; domestic refinery output covers only a fraction of daily demand, and close to 90 per cent of the imported volume moves through the Strait of Hormuz — the same chokepoint this blog has covered as a live risk to India's crude and gas supply more broadly. A domestic substitute that displaces even a single-digit share of that volume is, at national scale, a meaningful foreign-exchange number: CSIR researchers have estimated that replacing just 8 per cent of LPG consumption with dimethyl ether could save close to ₹9,500 crore a year in forex — a projection based on substitution that has not yet happened, not a saving already booked.

DME: the blend that exists, run by a body most readers have never heard of

Dimethyl ether (DME) is the technology furthest along, and the one with an actual regulator forced to change its mind in public. LERC — the LPG Equipment Research Centre, in Bengaluru — is not a government lab. It is a joint venture the three state oil marketing companies set up in 1990, with Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum holding stakes in a 50:25:25 ratio, built specifically to test and certify LPG equipment and run applied research on LPG-adjacent fuels. LERC is the body that actually ran the combustion and compatibility testing behind India's DME-blending standard.

That standard has already reversed direction once. The Bureau of Indian Standards notified IS 18698:2024, permitting DME blending into LPG up to 20 per cent by mass for domestic, commercial and industrial use. LERC's own thermal-efficiency testing, run to the IS 4246 method, had already found a blend at that upper end cut burner thermal efficiency by 5.26 per cent — a real but modest penalty. The bigger problem turned out to be materials, not combustion: a 2025 LERC study found elastomer seals, gaskets and hoses already in service across the LPG distribution network were not reliably compatible with DME concentrations anywhere near 20 per cent. BIS acted on that finding directly: IS 18698:2026 (First Revision), effective from 15 May 2026, cut the permitted blend to 8 per cent by mass — the level LERC's own testing and industry assessments describe as requiring zero modification to existing cylinders, regulators, valves, hoses or household burners.

The other half of the DME story is where the molecule would actually come from. India cannot simply import DME instead of LPG and call it self-reliance; the point of the exercise is domestic production. CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory, Pune, has developed an indigenous, patent-protected catalytic process converting methanol into DME, under a CSIR mission-mode project running since 2017, now at a claimed Technology Readiness Level of 6–7. Its pilot plant has scaled from 20–24 litres a day in 2020 to roughly 250 kilograms a day now, with a 2.5-tonne-a-day demonstration plant the next planned step toward commercial scale. DME's appeal on the production side is flexibility: it can be made from methanol, from Indian coal, or — more speculatively — from captured CO₂, which is also why it keeps appearing in India's carbon-capture and coal-to-chemicals policy conversations, not just its cooking-fuel one.

Hydrogen: three genuinely different things sharing one headline

"Hydrogen cooking" in Indian coverage collapses three technologies that have almost nothing in common except the word hydrogen, and conflating them is a real source of confusion this piece is trying not to reproduce.

1. Hydrogen blended into piped natural gas. This is the one that is real, deployed and already covered in detail on this blog: PNGRB's three approved city-gas pilots at Indore (GAIL/Avantika Gas, 1.1–2% initially, later 2% CNG/5% PNG), Kawas near Surat (NTPC and Gujarat Gas, 5% initial with a staged plan toward 20%, hydrogen made by electrolysis powered by a 1 MW floating solar array) and Ahmedabad (Adani Total Gas, gradual rise toward 8%-plus). This is genuinely running gas into genuine kitchens — but it is piped natural gas, delivered through low-pressure networks in a handful of cities, not the LPG cylinder most of India cooks on.

2. Hydrogen blended into an LPG cylinder specifically. This is a materially harder problem than DME blending, and the difference is physical, not regulatory. LPG stays liquid inside a sealed cylinder at ordinary temperatures because propane and butane have critical temperatures well above room temperature; hydrogen's critical temperature is about −240°C, so it cannot be liquefied under any pressure a domestic cylinder could safely hold. A "hydrogen-blended cylinder" is therefore not a simple percentage mix the way DME-in-LPG is — it is a two-phase problem (a compressed gas sharing a sealed vessel with a liquefied one) that combustion researchers are still studying computationally. The published Indian work found for this piece — a chemical-kinetics and computational study of hydrogen-blended LPG in domestic burners, and separate combustion/explosion-sensitivity studies on hydrogen-LPG and hydrogen-LPG-DME mixtures — is simulation and bench-scale research, not a field pilot. This piece did not find any named Indian trial actually running hydrogen-blended LPG cylinders in real kitchens, and treats the technology as lab-stage rather than imminent.

3. Hydrogen generated on demand, inside the appliance, with no blending at all. This is the only hydrogen-and-a-stove product actually for sale in India, and it is a different technology altogether from either of the above: Greenvize, an Indian startup, launched a cooktop in April 2026 with a proton-exchange-membrane (PEM) electrolyser built directly into the unit. Turn the knob, and the appliance splits water into hydrogen and oxygen on the spot and burns the hydrogen immediately — no cylinder, no pipeline, no blending, no storage. The company states the system needs about 1 kWh of electricity to support roughly six hours of cooking. It is priced at roughly ₹1.05 lakh for a single burner and ₹1.5 lakh for a double burner, plus GST — positioned, on that price, for commercial and institutional kitchens rather than mass residential adoption; this piece found no announced subsidy or National Green Hydrogen Mission linkage that would change that calculus for a household today.

Ethanol and methanol gel stoves: a real product, without a government program behind it

The user's own reference point here — SIMI Stove — is a genuinely existing commercial product, not a laboratory concept: a stove designed to burn "SIMI Cooking Gel," an ethanol/methanol-based fuel thickened into gel form for safer transport and handling, sold in India (alongside a UK and Nepal presence) as a portable, low-soot alternative to LPG or kerosene. The company states its patented design reaches 67.3 per cent efficiency against an industry average of 36 per cent. This piece could not independently verify that efficiency figure against any third-party or BIS-equivalent test; it is a company claim, not a certified one, and is reported here as such.

What SIMI is not is a government-backed national program. That distinction matters because one is now being asked for: the Grain Ethanol Manufacturers Association (GEMA) has publicly urged the government to introduce ethanol-based cookstoves as a complementary alternative to LPG, explicitly citing India's LPG import exposure as the rationale — the same industry logic this piece opened with, now coming from ethanol producers rather than oil marketing companies. As of this piece's research, that is an industry ask, not an adopted policy; this piece found no PIB release, ministry scheme, or BIS ethanol-cookstove standard confirming the government has taken it up. Ethanol's own supply picture is one this blog has covered at length elsewhere — this blog's own reporting on India's ethanol surplus has covered, which is exactly the kind of surplus a cookstove market would want to absorb, if the standards and distribution existed to move it there.

Other redesigns already in the market, for comparison

Two other stove technologies are worth naming precisely because they show what "actually reached a kitchen" looks like, against which the DME/hydrogen/ethanol pathways above can be measured. Surya Nutan, Indian Oil's own indoor solar cooking system developed at its Faridabad R&D centre, is commercially sold today in three models priced ₹12,000 to ₹23,000, drawing power from a roof-mounted panel through a cable into a kitchen-based cooking unit that can run on solar or auxiliary power and switch between them automatically. Indian Oil states each kilogram of LPG the device displaces avoids roughly three kilograms of CO₂. Separately, improved biomass cookstoves — mud or metal-bodied designs with better airflow and combustion control than a traditional chulha — remain a live, lower-tech intervention that industry trackers put at 38 to 45 per cent thermal efficiency, and electrification of cooking via induction stoves is increasingly discussed as the next phase of the same transition, on the logic that India can generate electricity domestically in a way it cannot yet produce LPG.

What would fix this

• BIS and LERC should publish the 2025 elastomer-compatibility study behind the 20%-to-8% DME cap in full, not just its conclusion. A safety standard that halves its own permitted blend level on one study deserves a public methodology, not a cited-but-unpublished finding circulating through trade press.
• MoPNG or the OMCs should name a specific city, timeline and cylinder count for the first commercial DME-blended LPG pilot. An 8 per cent standard with no announced rollout leaves "DME is coming" indistinguishable from a standard that may sit unused for years, the way several BIS fuel-blend standards have before.
• Coverage and government communication should stop using "hydrogen cooking" as a single category. Piped-gas blending, cylinder blending and on-site electrolysis are different technologies at different readiness levels; a reader cannot evaluate any one of them while they are reported as interchangeable.
• A BIS-equivalent efficiency and safety certification should exist for ethanol/methanol gel cookstoves before they are recommended at any policy level, so a company's own efficiency claim (SIMI's 67.3 per cent, in this piece) is not the only figure a buyer or a policymaker has to go on.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.