UTILIZED SOFTWARE 

Leapfrog Works and Viewer (Seequent)

LOCATION 

Norway

ORGANIZATION/COMPANY 

Norconsult Norge AS

At Norway's Mongstad refinery, legacy hydrocarbon, PAH, and PFAS contamination risked migrating into receiving marine environments, while legacy 2D GIS and CAD tools left Norconsult Norge AS without the spatial context needed to represent complex groundwater flow or plume geometry. Working with Equinor and the Norwegian Environment Agency, Norconsult used Seequent Leapfrog Works to consolidate heterogeneous geological datasets into a single integrated 3D subsurface model — mapping infrastructure, groundwater levels, and contamination plumes together, applying block modeling for contaminant visualization, and generating MODFLOW-ready files for Visual MODFLOW Flex flow simulations. Leapfrog Viewer put that same model in front of the client and the regulator, streamlining approvals and preventing overly conservative mitigation measures. The model quantified exact PFAS mass so remediation could be targeted at delineated contamination zones rather than applied broadly, minimizing soil excavation and material transport and cutting the project's carbon footprint, while reducing model update and reinterpretation effort by approximately 20% and securing engineering-hour and cost savings on the NOK 30 million, 20,000-hour program running to May 2028. The model now lives on as a decision-support and risk-management tool for refinery operations — identifying contaminant pathways after accidental releases and guiding monitoring well placement — proving 3D subsurface modeling as the foundation for protecting land, water, and public health.