Some have called it Europe’s answer to the Suez Canal.
The Seine-Nord Europe Canal in northern France is the largest construction project of its kind on the continent. When complete, the €7.3 billion waterway will connect France to Belgium, the Netherlands, and beyond, giving the country access to the major northern European ports of Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg for the first time.
The need is real, and the solution is long overdue. Boats and barges can carry a lot of freight—a single vessel can fit the cargo equivalent of 220 trucks—and France has 8,500 kilometers of navigable waterways, the largest network on the continent. But the waterways don’t connect well with neighboring countries. This leaves French companies without direct water access to the major ports that drive continental and overseas trade.
Inland waterways are among Europe’s underutilized freight assets. In 2024, nearly half a billion tons of goods moved across the EU via these networks, up from the prior year. But those goods account for a small fraction of EU freight compared to road and rail.
The Seine-Nord Europe Canal is designed to close that gap, but building it is an engineering challenge as large as the ambition. The 107-kilometer channel must accommodate vessels of up to 4,000 metric tons, more than seven times the capacity of its predecessor, the Canal du Nord. Two of its locks, at 25 meters deep, will be the deepest ever built in Europe. The Seine-Nord will also feature the continent’s longest canal viaduct, a 1.3-kilometer stretch where the waterway passes over the Somme River. It will also cross large highways. The Somme area was the site of some of the most gruesome and protracted fighting on the Western Front during World War I. As a result, the canal project has also been recognized as Europe’s largest preventive archaeological undertaking, having uncovered and reinterred soldiers killed there.
With so much at stake and so little margin for error, the builders couldn’t afford to discover problems in the field. That challenge is the subject of a new mini-documentary by the B1M, a popular video channel dedicated to construction, that takes viewers inside the project and the technology behind it.
Egis, the canal’s main contractor, turned to Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company, to help it deliver this massive project. Using Bentley’s ProjectWise software, the team built a connected data environment that allowed hundreds of engineers, designers, and contractors to collaborate, visualize the full project, and catch conflicts before workers started digging.
“It’s very important for this project to manage the BIM, manage the 3D model, and manage data because it’s the first time [for us] to have 250 people collaborate inside,” said Arnold Ledan, BIM manager at Egis. “With the federated model, it’s very easy to understand the project.”
A lock model inside Bentley Infrastructure Cloud. Image courtesy of Egis.Egis supplemented ProjectWise with Bentley’s MicroStation and OpenRoads applications. Together, the tools improved productivity by more than 40% and reduced model-generation time by more than 60%—gains that matter enormously on a project of this duration and cost.
The model will live long after boats start carrying freight to Rotterdam. It will serve as a living record for the canal’s operators, supporting asset management for decades to come.
The canal is expected to open in 2032. When it does, backers say it will pull freight off congested roads, lower carbon emissions, and give French industry direct water access to some of the world’s busiest ports. It will finally connect Europe’s largest waterway network to the continent it was always meant to serve.
