The green ammonia sector has accumulated a substantial pipeline of announced projects over the past five years. Hundreds of gigawatts of electrolyser capacity have been described in feasibility studies and press releases, with nameplate targets running into the tens of millions of tonnes per annum. Very few of those projects have moved beyond announcement. Reaching final investment decision — the point at which financing is committed, contracts are signed, and construction can begin — has remained the defining test that most cannot pass.
AM Green's decision in August 2024 to commit capital to its 1 MTPA Kakinada facility in Andhra Pradesh therefore carries weight that goes well beyond the project itself. It is the largest FID ever confirmed for a green ammonia project globally, and at the time of writing it remains one of only a handful of large-scale, RFNBO-compliant green ammonia plants under active construction anywhere in the world.
What the Kakinada project actually is
The Kakinada facility is a brownfield conversion. AM Green — founded by the same team behind Greenko, India's largest renewable energy company — acquired the site of the former Nagarjuna Fertilizers and Chemicals plant earlier in 2024 and is converting it from a conventional ammonia and urea operation to a fully green process. The strategic logic is straightforward: existing port access, grid connections, and industrial infrastructure reduce the capital and time required to reach first production.
The plant will integrate 1.28 GW of advanced pressurised alkaline electrolysis capacity, supplied by John Cockerill of Belgium under a long-term strategic partnership, with Rely (a joint venture between Technip Energies and John Cockerill) serving as the engineering, procurement and construction manager. Renewable power will be supplied round the clock via a 4,500 MW solar and wind hybrid portfolio, complemented by 950 MW of pumped storage — a configuration designed to achieve the temporal matching requirements that RFNBO certification demands. A 25-year fixed-price power purchase agreement with NTPC covers a substantial portion of that capacity.
The Kakinada facility has received pre-certification from CertifHy as complying with EU RFNBO requirements, including additionality and hourly matching. This places it among a very small group of projects globally that have secured this status ahead of first production.
Construction began formally in January 2026, when Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu inaugurated the first major equipment erection ceremony. The project is expected to reach completion in approximately 37 months from FID, putting first ammonia production on a September to October 2027 timeline. Commercial supply to export markets is targeted from 2028.
Offtake: who has committed, and what it tells us
Perhaps the most significant signal from Kakinada is the offtake structure AM Green has assembled. Prior to FID, the company had executed term sheets with Uniper, Yara Clean Ammonia, and Keppel. These are not marginal buyers. Uniper is one of Europe's largest energy companies, with an active programme to develop ammonia cracking capacity and a stated goal of becoming a central hub for green hydrogen supply into Germany and the Netherlands. Yara Clean Ammonia is the world's largest ammonia trader. Keppel represents the Asian market and specifically the growing Singapore-Japan corridor.
In January 2026, the Uniper relationship was formalised into a binding long-term offtake agreement covering up to 500,000 tonnes per year — half of Kakinada's nameplate output — from 2028. This is, at the time of writing, the largest RFNBO-compliant ammonia offtake agreement ever signed between an emerging market producer and a European buyer. Its significance for the sector lies not just in the volume but in the price-discovery function it performs: a binding agreement at commercial scale provides the kind of financial signal that enables other projects to approach their own lenders.
Why the FID test matters so much
The green ammonia sector's central challenge is not a shortage of project announcements. It is a shortage of projects that can demonstrate to lenders and equity investors that the economics are sufficiently de-risked to commit capital. FID requires, at minimum: secured offtake with creditworthy counterparties at a price sufficient to service debt; a completed engineering design that supports the cost estimate; grid or dedicated power supply confirmed at the required specification; regulatory approvals in place; and a construction contractor under contract.
Most projects that have been announced since 2021 cannot yet demonstrate all of these simultaneously. The result is a pipeline that looks impressive in aggregate capacity terms but is highly concentrated at the early stage of development. The Ammonia Observatory's tracker of 119 projects across seven regions shows the majority sitting at planned or in-development status, with a small number of operational plants — almost all of them sub-scale pilots — and very few under active construction at commercial scale.
Of the 119 projects tracked by the Observatory, fewer than ten have reached or exceeded what would be considered a bankable FID by institutional lenders. Kakinada is, by capacity, the largest of those.
The India dimension
The Kakinada project also has implications that are specific to India's role in the global green energy supply chain. India currently imports approximately 2.4 million tonnes of ammonia annually, while simultaneously being one of the world's larger conventional ammonia producers. The country's National Green Hydrogen Mission targets 5 million tonnes of green hydrogen production by 2030, with green ammonia as the primary derivative.
India's competitive advantages in green ammonia are genuine: solar irradiation levels that support some of the world's lowest renewable electricity costs, a large and growing electrolyser manufacturing base, existing port infrastructure on both coasts, and a government that has moved relatively quickly to put in place supporting policy frameworks including the SIGHT reverse auction programme. SECI's SIGHT rounds achieved record-low bid prices in 2025, approaching cost parity with conventional grey ammonia under long-term contract conditions — a milestone that was widely regarded as ambitious when the mission was first announced.
AM Green is not stopping at Kakinada. The company has announced plans for green ammonia production facilities at Tuticorin in Tamil Nadu and Kandla in Gujarat, targeting a combined portfolio capacity of 4 to 5 MTPA by 2030. If even a portion of that pipeline reaches FID at the pace Kakinada has demonstrated, India's emergence as a green ammonia export hub will be a structuring feature of global trade by the early 2030s.
What happens next
The benchmark Kakinada sets is both encouraging and clarifying. Encouraging, because a project of this scale reaching construction demonstrates that the technical and commercial conditions for gigawatt-scale green ammonia production are achievable. Clarifying, because the conditions that made Kakinada fundable — brownfield conversion, round-the-clock renewable power with storage, RFNBO pre-certification, and binding long-term offtake from European utilities — are demanding ones that not every project in the global pipeline can replicate.
The next test for the sector is whether Kakinada's success accelerates FID timelines for other projects currently sitting in development, or whether it remains an outlier for another two to three years. The Observatory will track construction milestones at Kakinada alongside FID developments in the broader pipeline through 2026 and 2027.