Founders’ Honors

Mongstad refinery in Norway faced a complex environmental challenge: subsurface contamination had the potential to migrate toward the marine environment, while fill materials, seabed sediments, buried infrastructure, and strict compliance timelines complicated assessments. The nationally significant refinery handles more than 80% of Norway’s total fuel demand, making accurate environmental analysis essential. Norconsult Norge AS, responsible for environmental assessment and decision support, needed to understand groundwater behavior, plume geometry, and migration pathways across large, mixed datasets. Earlier two-dimensional drawings, spreadsheets, and mapping layers could not present these conditions together, creating the need for a defensible basis for risk evaluation and mitigation planning.

Norconsult developed a three-dimensional subsurface model in Seequent’s Leapfrog Works, combining geological, hydrogeological, contamination, and infrastructure data in a single environment. Leapfrog Viewer supported quality assurance, review, and communication with partners and regulators, while block models quantified contaminant mass and volume by zone. Compared with traditional two-dimensional methods, the workflow reduced model update and reinterpretation efforts by approximately 20%, supporting targeted remediation planning, faster responses to new data and regulatory feedback, and compliance timelines without delays.