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IIRC there's been some articles written on how Japan has strategically betting big on importing hydrogen from Australia: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/japanese-govt-awards...

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Producing hydrogen from brown coal completely misses the objective.

Not really, gasifying the coal means you capture all the products, so the carbon is captured by default instead of released into the atmosphere which is what would happen if it were burned in a coal power station instead.

The ideal would be to actually make green Hydrogen, but frankly until the grid is 100% electric anyway it doesn't actually matter what we make with the green energy as long as we build it.

The carbon won’t be captured as in buried, it’ll be burned for energy of some form and the CO2 released into the atmosphere. And at the same time, it will keep the mines open and busy pulling new carbon up out of the ground, when otherwise the economics would probably dictate reducing overall production. Meanwhile a battery electric vehicle can charge from zero-CO2 power without wasting a ton of it on electrolysis (which isn’t available at scale yet anyway.)

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