This oft-repeated claim is incorrect. Burning hydrogen in air produces NOx and other pollutants, and this confusion is promoted by fossil fuel companies that persist in telling us that it's fine to keep burning things.
Hydrogen is great, but burning it is not sensible, be it by itself, or mixed into natural gas.
> “hydrogen lobby, whose main players are fossil gas companies, declared a combined annual expenditure of €58.6m trying to influence Brussels policy making”
https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/liebreich-oil...
Hydrogen can produce NOx when burned, if you burn it in air. You can burn it in flue gas (a combination of pure oxygen and CO2). Or you can simply use it in fuel cells to produce electricity.
To me the main issue with this discovery that that this "large deposit" is not nearly large enough. At the high end of the estimate it would be 250 million tons of H2, which would replace about 600 million tons of CH4, which would result in about 1.5 gigatons of CO2. That's a lot, but we emit about 50 gigatons of CO2 equivalent each year. We'd need many hundreds of these fields to make a significant dent in our emissions.
I don't think I quite understand your comment. What type of process equipment has flue gas with only O2 and CO2?
Normally burning is done in air, which has more nitrogen than oxygen.
At the high temperature of the flame, a small part of the nitrogen also burns, producing nitrogen oxides, besides the hydrogen oxide, a.k.a. water.
Not much different from burning other stuffs in air, really (gasoline / diesel included). Of course the burn conditions have a big effect. And cleanup after the burn (catalysts) is possible.
But imho the more sensible thing would be to input the H2 into a fuel cell.
If the byproducts are a liquid an a gas, seems like it would be easy to separate the two.
Or is there a cheap source of nitrogen less air/ oxygen?
(And yes, you can and should condense out the water so you can recover the higher heating value instead of the lower heating value, and H2 will have the nice property that the condensate won’t be especially acidic, unlike boiler condensate from hydrocarbons, which is annoyingly acidic.)
Well the fact remains you have an exhaust with elevated nox.
So the 3 options are to stop the nox being created to start with (no nitrogen), convert the nox into something else (nitrous oxide?) or release/store/use the nox for something.
I'm not a chemist so I don't know what's possible / economic, thus the question.