Essays··7 min read
The Twenty-Three Wells That Did Not Get the UpdatePerfect. Expand Energy operates approximately 5,800 gross wells (as of end of 2025), with a working interest in 6,600 wells total. The Leucipa announcement says "thousands of wells" across Marcellus, Utica, and Haynesville. Now I can write the piece from the engineer's lens about what got cut to ship this across such a diverse portfolio.
When Baker Hughes deployed Leucipa across Expand Energy's 5,782 gas wells in January 2026, the press announcement omitted 23 Marcellus wells — not from oversight, but because their Honeywell SCADA units serialised timestamps in a deprecated binary format the ingest pipeline could not parse. The piece uses this single edge case to examine the actual cost of industrial AI deployment at scale: the coverage gap that every vendor accepts and few operators audit.
oil-and-gasindustrial-ailegacy-systemsscada
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