Building Trust Through Open Science at Shell

Making Innovation Accessible with Posit and Shiny

Shell made a very deliberate, strategic choice to release GWSDAT as an open-source R package. Shell determined that widespread adoption, transparency, and regulatory acceptance delivered greater strategic value than proprietary licensing. Open sourcing helped reduce barriers for internal users and consultants, supported transparency and confidence in statistical analyses during regulatory engagement, fostered academic collaboration, and supported more consistent and efficient groundwater decisions across Shell’s global portfolio, while aligning with Shell’s broader open innovation and sustainability objectives.

Using a Shiny user interface provides significant benefits for GWSDAT by making advanced spatiotemporal statistical methods accessible to non-specialist users through an intuitive, interactive graphical interface. In addition, using Shiny enables intuitive slice‑and‑dice analysis of groundwater datasets by allowing users to interactively filter wells, time periods, and analytes and immediately see the impact on trends and spatial patterns, supporting rapid hypothesis testing and insight without the need for custom code. While the Shell team deploys their Shiny applications to Posit Connect, the Shiny framework allows GWSDAT to be deployed flexibly—either locally on a user’s machine or via online web hosted applications. Using Shiny’s functionality to pass additional arguments via URL calls has made it easier to deploy GWSDAT in an API style for database integration so data can flow in automatically, reducing manual effort and making analyses quicker and more consistent.

Trust through Transparency

Thanks to its open-source foundation, GWSDAT has become a globally adopted standard in the groundwater contaminant industry, with widespread use across regulatory agencies and major industrial stakeholders. It has already been downloaded over 10,000 times and is referenced in more than ten case studies, including applications by Shell, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and Exxon, and has been featured in multilingual training materials such as videos in Indonesian (www.gwsdat.net/case-studies). The UK Environment Agency formally recognises GWSDAT in its Land Contamination Risk Management guidance as a recommended tool for contaminated land risk assessment (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/land-contamination-risk-management-lcrm/lcrm-stage-1-risk-assessment#GWSDAT). Additionally, the Interstate Technology & Regulatory Council includes GWSDAT in its guidance (ITRC GSMC-1) underscoring its credibility and utility across the project life cycle. More recently, GWSDAT is highly referenced in the ASTM guide for E3488-25 Standard Guide for Moving Sites to Closure for Petroleum Underground Storage Tank Releases.

Transparency as a Growth Engine

The success of GWSDAT proved that "Open Science" is a tactical asset, not just a corporate value. Shell is now applying this transparent blueprint to many other initiatives. It has opened doors to more collaborative ways of working and created a public GitHub site of Shell open-source projects: https://github.com/sede-open. Two such statistical application examples are https://github.com/sede-open/covXtreme and  pyELQ Python Emission Localization and Quantification. The GWSDAT shiny architecture has also been adopted by other open-source environmental monitoring tools: LNAPL Toolbox. This toolbox uses a combination of both R and Python code, another benefit of using Posit Connect.