
GERG attended the EU Hydrogen Research and Innovation Days 2025, held on November 24-25 in Brussels (Belgium). The project represented the OPTHYCS, THOTH2, and SHIMMER projects, which participated in this event. During these two days, our representatives were able to share our initiatives that aim to promote the use of hydrogen with experts, policymakers, and innovators to discuss the role of hydrogen in Europe's energy transition.
On Monday 24, GERG attended the Clean Hydrogen Partnership Awards 2025, where our OPTHYCS project was nominated in the Best Innovation Award category. After a brief presentation of the project, OPTHYCS was not selected as the award winner, but it was shortlisted as a finalist project from among more than 100 projects (Presentation of the project: 3:39:20 – 3:39:32).
On Tuesday 25, Ludovico Mazzocco, Project Officer at GERG, represented the THOTH2 project in the panel “Cross-Cutting Aspects – Safety and Pre-Normative Research for Standardisation.” During the session, Mazzocco presented THOTH2’s main lines of action, highlighting the project’s development of specialised methodologies essential for reliable and safe hydrogen integration. The project is contributing to covering gaps that will enable hydrogen to be distributed in the current gas transmission and distribution grids, developing new approaches to gas metering, gas volume conversion devices, pressure and temperature transducers, gas quality analysers, and gas leak detectors (Presentation of the project: 1:12:40 – 1:21:40).
The SHIMMER project was also presented at the same panel session. Huib Blokland, director of energy transition projects at TNO, and GERG Board member, presented the consortium's progress in identifying the technical and regulatory gaps that still limit the safe integration of hydrogen into existing multi-gas networks across Europe. During his intervention, he presented the consortium’s progress in identifying the technical and regulatory gaps that still limit the safe integration of hydrogen into existing multi-gas networks across Europe. The presentation consisted of an overall review of the project, checking the carried out activities in each Work Package (Presentation of the project: 36:15 – 50:05).
In addition, the OPTHYCS and NHyRA projects were also featured on this panel. In this case, both projects were presented by Alberto Garcia Hombrados, Project Officer in the Clean Hydrogen Partnership (CHP), as examples of initiatives sponsored by the CHP in the areas of safety, Pre-Normative Research on Standardization, and the promotion of regulations, codes, and standards (Presentation of the project: 28:30 – 30:30).
In addition to our colleague Ludovico Mazzocco, our colleagues Miguel Ballesteros, Programme Delivery Manager, and Jon Larrachea, connected with policymakers, innovators, and stakeholders to amplify GERG’s impact in Europe’s energy transition.




