PART 4
NMR Well Logging at Schlumberger
ROBERT L. KLEINBERG
Schlumberger–Doll Research, Old Quarry Road, Ridge-
field, Connecticut 06877; e-mail: kleinberg@ridgefield.
sdr.slb.com
KEY WORDS: NMR; NMR instrumenta-
tion; borehole NMR; petroleum exploration;
Schlumberger CMR wireline tool; oil and gas
industry
INTRODUCTION
Ever since 1927, when the first electrical borehole
measurements were made in the French oil field
at Pechelbronn, Schlumberger has prided itself on
bringing advanced technology to the petroleum
industry (1,2). Thus it should be no surprise that
in the early 1950’s, Schlumberger scientists already
were working on designs for nuclear magnetic
resonance borehole logging instrumentation (3).
Nicolaas Bloembergen, retained as a consultant,
authored a series of internal memos, a patent
application filed in 1954 (4), and a paper on the
Overhauser effect (5).
The 1950’s was a very busy decade for Schlum-
berger. Work on a practical NMR borehole
logging tool was crowded out as a plethora of elec-
tromagnetic, gamma ray, and neutron instruments
were introduced (6). In the meantime, Chevron
took the lead in NMR instrumentation (7). When
Schlumberger returned to NMR, it found engi-
neering the Chevron design difficult. After several
not very successful attempts to build a commer-
cially viable tool, Schlumberger introduced the
NMT-B (nuclear magnetism tool) in 1979 (8), fol-
lowed by the NMT-CB in 1987 (9). These tools
Received 2 May 2001; revised 22 June 2001;
accepted 22 June 2001.
Concepts in Magnetic Resonance, Vol. 13(6), 396–403 (2001)
© 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
396
generated a lot of interest, but not much revenue.
The problems with these tools were a case study
in the collision of good physics with the peculiari-
ties of the oil industry:
• To save rig time, three or four different types
of logging tools (resistivity, acoustic, gamma
ray, neutron, etc.) normally are run simulta-
neously. However, the NMT was not com-
binable with other borehole logging tools
because the coil polarization required the
full output of the wireline truck’s generating
capacity. Moreover, it was a difficult tool to
use, requiring a specialist engineer.
• The proton Larmor frequency in the Earth’s
magnetic field varies considerably with geo-
graphical location, from 2.6 kHz in Canada
to 1.0 kHz in Argentina. Because the sig-
nal level is approximately proportional to
Larmor frequency, a measurement that was
acceptable in Canada was unacceptably weak
in Argentina. Ironically, unusual formation
properties made Argentina one of the pri-
mary potential markets for the tool.
• To kill the proton signal from the borehole,
the fluid in it had to be doped with magnetite.
Drilling fluids (“muds”) are remarkably com-
plex mixtures of liquid, polymeric, and solid
components. Occasionally, the addition of
magnetite adversely affected the chemical
and rheological properties of the drilling
mud. To the NMR spectroscopist this may
appear to be a technical detail. To the drilling
engineer, it is an expensive disaster, and one
not to be repeated.
Despite these vexing problems, the promise of
nuclear magnetic resonance could not be denied.
Throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s, researchers
at Mobil (see, e.g., (10)), Shell (see, e.g., (11)),
Chevron (see, e.g., (12)), and other oil companies
worked on understanding laboratory NMR mea-
surements of fluids in rocks. The laboratory work
showed that NMR relaxation time gave rather
direct information about pore sizes and, there-
fore, hydraulic permeability. Among the myriad

oil reservoir properties measured by a myriad of
borehole logging tools, a glaring omission was a
fast and reliable measurement of hydraulic perme-
ability. Thus NMR was seen as being able to pro-
vide important reservoir information that could be
obtained in no other way.
INSPIRATION FROM LOS ALAMOS
The energy crisis of the 1970’s gave U.S.
national laboratories impetus to support nonnu-
clear energy-related projects. One result was the
construction of a novel borehole NMR tool at Los
Alamos National Laboratory (13–15). Although
many patents describing NMR magnet-and-coil
devices for borehole application had been issued
in the decades since 1950 (3), most of those
designs looked improbable and there was no indi-
cation that any had ever been built. In contrast,
the Los Alamos design showed real insight into
the physics of NMR measurement: it was fully
characterized and described in the scientific lit-
erature, and it was demonstrated to function as
intended. The Los Alamos group also analyzed
their NMR signals to obtain a distribution of pore
sizes (16), foreshadowing today’s most important
use of NMR logging tools. Although the Los
Alamos design was never commercialized, it stim-
ulated the thinking of all who came after. One
might think that the U.S. Department of Energy
would have publicized these successes to show that
tax dollars spent in the national laboratory system
contributed to the common good. Strangely, how-
ever, the story seems to be unknown except to a
few specialists.
The work at Los Alamos coincided with a
renewed effort to understand the NMR proper-
ties of rocks. Insights were borrowed from NMR
studies of biological cells (17) and synthetic mate-
rials (18). At Schlumberger–Doll Research, new
methods were brought to bear to understand
NMR properties of rocks (19,20), while traditional
petrophysical techniques were used to establish
a new correlation between NMR relaxation time
and fluid permeability (21).
A NEW DESIGN FOR
INSIDE-OUT NMR
In the spring of 1985, Weng Chew, Douglas Grif-
fin, and I found ourselves with time on our hands.
We had just finished a project that was to mature
NMR WELL LOGGING AT SCHLUMBERGER 397
into the successful Schlumberger oil base mud
dipmeter (22) and we were looking for some-
thing to work on. Inspired by the new laboratory
petrophysics and the novel Los Alamos design, we
started thinking about new designs for borehole
NMR apparatus. It was obvious from the outset
that this project would be challenging. Reports
from the Los Alamos group made it abundantly
clear that small signal levels were going to be
a major problem in designing a borehole NMR
tool. This was no surprise, because every rule
for designing NMR equipment was being broken.
Laboratory NMR apparatus was moving to higher
and higher frequencies, in part because the signal-
to-noise ratio scales as nearly the square of the
Larmor frequency (23), but magnets simply can-
not generate comparably high fields in external
volumes. Moreover, what a laboratory spectro-
scopist would call the coil-filling factor—the effi-
ciency with which RF fields are radiated to and
from the sample—was absurdly low in the bore-
hole situation, on the order of 10−2 .
A design that pushed the sources of the static
and RF fields as close as possible to the borehole
wall would maximize both the coil-filling factor
and the static magnetic field in the formation.
That immediately suggested an instrument that
contacted the borehole wall and projected the
magnetic fields to one side. The first such idea
was a Los Alamos-like magnet array, in which the
magnets were canted toward the formation; see
Fig. 4.1. However, moving the field sources closer
to the formation sacrified resonated volume. To
regain volume while still resonating only one side
of the borehole, the volume of investigation had
to be elongated. The pair of longitudinally magne-
tized bar magnets used in the Los Alamos design
was abandoned in favor of a pair of slab magnets,
elongated along the borehole axis and magnetized
transversely; see Fig. 4.2. The idea of keeping
the north poles in proximity to each other was
retained from the Los Alamos concept. In the new
design, there was a point inside the earth forma-
tion at which all spatial derivatives of the static
magnetic field vanished.
The length of the magnet array was obviously
a critical parameter. The longer the magnets and
RF antenna (which had not yet been designed),
the larger the resonated volume and the larger the
NMR signal. On the other hand, it is dangerous to
make wall-engaging tools too long. Boreholes are
often very rough, and a long wall-engaging tool
face (“skid”) will lose contact with the wall when
horizontal layers of rock are differentially eroded
398 THE HISTORY OF NMR WELL LOGGING
Figure 4.1 First stage of evolution of the Schlum-
berger tool from the Los Alamos tool.
during drilling. A short skid is better able to fol-
low the profile of the borehole and retain con-
tact with the formation. Whereas it was obvious
the NMR instrument would not look more than
an inch or two into the formation, and because
any amount of borehole fluid in the resonated vol-
ume would wreck the measurement, the skid had
to be as short as possible. There is simply no way
to rationally optimize the skid length, because the
character of borehole rugosity differs from forma-
tion to formation. The only solution was to find
other skid-type borehole logging tools with shal-
low depths of investigation that seemed to work
in most wells. The Schlumberger electromagnetic
propagation tool (EPT) fit that description. Its
skid is 12 in. long, and that determined the length
of the NMR skid.
One idea that was quickly dismissed was to use
coils to generate the static magnetic field. A sim-
Figure 4.2 Second stage of evolution: bar magnets to
slabs (cross section).
ple calculation showed that power consumption
would be prohibitive. After the experience with
the NMT, Schlumberger was mindful of the prob-
lems associated with demanding more than a few
hundred watts from the downhole power system.
Superconducting magnets, even if the newly dis-
covered high TC materials were used, required
cooling systems that are hard to engineer. Cer-
tainly there was no point to undertaking that task
unless absolutely necessary. Modern permanent
magnet materials easily met all the requirements
for an NMR tool without drawing any power or
requiring a cooling system.
A patent search was conducted to see if an
instrument of the type contemplated already had
been invented. By the mid-1980’s, an amazing
number of patents had been issued for borehole
NMR devices (3). Most of them described simple
bar or horseshoe magnets. The design closest to
that shown in Fig. 4.2 was patented by Schwede
and was assigned to Schlumberger in 1970. It fea-
tured a magnet elongated along the borehole axis
and magnetized transversely, resonating an elon-
gated volume on one side of the borehole. How-
ever, north and south poles faced each other, and
so failed to produce a line on which all spatial gra-
dients of the static field vanished.
LABORATORY PROTOTYPE
Armed with a basic idea, the “pulse nuclear mag-
netism tool” (PNMT) project officially started
in the summer of 1985. Griffin and I contin-
ued on the project; Chew returned to his man-
agement responsibilities, and later left to take a
professorship in the electrical engineering depart-
ment of the University of Illinois in Urbana–
Champaign. Chew was replaced by Apo Sezginer,
a new Ph.D. electrical engineer from MIT. Masa-
fumi Fukuhara from Schlumberger engineering in
Fuchinobe, Japan, also was added.
There was no clear division of responsibil-
ities within this group—everyone worked on
everything. However, Sezginer brought a highly
disciplined approach to instrument design and
quickly became the chief architect of the tool.
Working within a set of predetermined housing
diameters, he optimized the shapes, sizes, and
positions of the magnets to give the largest pos-
sible field in the largest possible external volume.
This could be done with considerable confidence
because modern magnet materials can be modeled
accurately.

Designing the megahertz RF antenna was much
harder. Designs that theoretically were most effi-
cient turned out to be controlled by parasitic
effects that were hard to model accurately. Thus
antenna development was very much a cut-and-
try laboratory exercise, and all kinds of ideas were
tried: many turns, few turns, coils made out of
foil, coils made of litz wire, coils wound on ferrite,
coils wound in various orientations, etc. Finally,
coils were abandoned, and a simple half-coaxial
antenna adopted. Even that idea went down some
evolutionary dead ends before being perfected.
Figure 4.3 shows the PNMT design at this stage.
Given the signal-to-noise limitation, every
means was exploited to make the measurement
as efficient as possible. The antenna was filled
with ferrite, which should have improved the sig-
nal level by about a factor of 3. However, it quickly
was discovered that the ferrite was saturated, and
thereby rendered useless, by the large static field
generated by the magnets. This led to develop-
ment of a ferrite-loaded antenna protected from
the magnets with a permeable steel shell. Another
important step was to make the antenna dead-
time as short as possible, allowing the accumula-
tion of spin echoes at a rapid rate. To do this,
a large magnetoacoustic ringing signal had to be
quelled by a combination of mechanical design
and a phase alternated pulse sequence. The result-
ing laboratory prototype NMR instrument and
the electromagnetic theory of the antenna are
described elsewhere (24, 25).
The PNMT group decided to build its own
NMR spectrometer, because in the mid-1980’s
there were no commercial NMR spectrometers
that operated at the low Larmor frequencies—
Figure 4.3 Final Schlumberger laboratory PNMT
configuration.
NMR WELL LOGGING AT SCHLUMBERGER 399
around 1 MHz—that characterized the inside-out
NMR concept. The consensus of informed opin-
ion was that this task should be contracted out
to an NMR engineering company. However, it
was felt that the only way to really understand
the measurement was to build the equipment in-
house. There were several novel circuits to design
and a commercial AM radio station with a trans-
mitter 1000 yd from the Schlumberger laboratory
to compete with. The major capital purchase was
a 1 kW, 10 kHz to 10 MHz, Class AB, uncon-
ditionally stable, 16-ft3 power amplifier that cost
$18,000. After it was ordered but before it was
received, Irving Lowe, the widely respected pio-
neer of NMR instrumentation, told the PNMT
group that under no circumstances should a power
amplifier be purchased from that manufacturer.
The amplifier showed up and, after a few internal
modifications, worked flawlessly. The spectrome-
ter is described elsewhere (26).
During that period, a number of visitors
reviewed the nascent Schlumberger NMR tool.
One visitor was John Deutch, MIT professor and
later Assistant Secretary of Defense and then
Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. A
furious 20-min argument ensued over whether
NMR measurements had anything to do with
hydraulic permeability. Another visitor was the
late Jerome Wiesner, science advisor to Presi-
dent Kennedy and president of MIT. Wiesner
had worked on radar duplexers at the MIT
Radiation Laboratory during World War II. The
Schlumberger team knew this and casually men-
tioned that “we invented our own duplexer for
the PNMT, superior to any of the standard radar
designs.” “Let me see that schematic,” Wiesner
said as he grabbed the circuit diagram.
By late summer 1986 everything was together.
In the best tradition of Schlumberger Research,
the laboratory model sonde was square, “suit-
able for logging square boreholes.” It is shown
in Fig. 4.4, sitting out on the lawn for its first
“field test.” The first spin echoes were observed on
12 September 1986. Shortening the CPMG echo
spacing to 0.16 ms and improving the efficiency of
the antenna consumed much of the next year. To
make sure the relative motion of the sensor and
the sample would not make the NMR signal disap-
pear and that speed corrections to the relaxation
times were small and predictable, Fukuhara built
a flow loop to circulate water through the sensed
volume of the tool. By late 1987, the project
was ready to go to Schlumberger Engineering in
Houston.
400 THE HISTORY OF NMR WELL LOGGING
Figure 4.4 “Field test” of the PNMT prototype, “suit-
able for logging square holes.”
It is ironic that, during this period, the
Schlumberger group also invented a tool simi-
lar to what would became the NUMAR MRIL
(27). Sezginer proposed a cylindrical ferrite mag-
net, magnetized transversely and wrapped with a
coil whose windings were distributed according to
the cosine function. The tool would be centralized
in the borehole and resonate a cylindrical shell.
The cosine coil form already had been cut when it
was noted that only a thin shell, of thickness about
1 mm, would be resonated. It was believed that
the lateral motion of the tool during logging would
ruin the measurement, so the idea was dropped
without filing a patent application.
MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUE:
T 1 VERSUS T2
Building the hardware was only part of developing
a viable tool. The development of the measure-
ment technique also had its pitfalls and surprises.
Until the late 1980’s, all laboratory experiments on
rocks were based on measurements of T1 , avoid-
ing T2 . The reason for this is simple. Rocks filled
with oil and/or water are granular porous media
with a significant content of paramagnetic ions in
the solid phase and a relatively nonmagnetic liq-
uid phase. Thus there are strong internal magnetic
field gradients, and the transverse relaxation of the
fluids is dominated by molecular diffusion in these
gradients (28). This makes T2 hard to interpret.
In contrast, T1 is generally linearly proportional to
pore size and thus embodies the most interesting
petrophysical information.
Unfortunately, determination of the longitudinal
magnetization decay requires a time-consuming
series of inversion-recovery measurements. Due to
the inherently low signal-to-noise ratio—limited
primarily by the low magnetic field intensity
generated by the tool in the surrounding rock
formation—there was no way a magnetic reso-
nance logging tool could measure T1 by inversion
recovery while moving at commercially accept-
able speeds in the borehole. In utter desperation,
the fast-inversion-recovery-CPMG (FIR-CPMG)
pulse sequence was invented; it measures T1 and
T2 simultaneously, faster than any of 60 other pub-
lished methods (29). It was expected that T2 would
be a useless by-product of this method and would
be discarded.
When simultaneous T1 and T2 measurements
were made on rocks using the laboratory proto-
type, it was found, to the considerable surprise
of the experimenters, that T1 and T2 were highly
correlated (30). Systematic investigation by Klein-
berg and Horsfield (31) showed that transverse
relaxation due to internal gradients was negligi-
ble at proton resonance frequencies of 5 MHz
and below. Fortuitously, the borehole tools are not
able to generate high static magnetic fields and,
therefore, do not generate large internal magnetic
field gradients in rocks. Static field gradients due
to the tool magnets either are known apparatus
constants or are negligible. A CPMG determina-
tion of T2 is much faster than any method of mea-
suring T1 . Since the logging tool operated at about
2 MHz, T2 became the measurement of choice,
and all the old petrophysical correlations with T1
were restated in terms of T2 (32). By a curious
twist of fate, the apparatus property that prevents
efficient measurement of T1 —low magnetic field
strength—is exactly the same property that per-
mits meaningful measurement of T2 .
An additional reason to measure T2 in prefer-
ence to T1 was discovered by Ridvan Akkurt when
he worked at Schlumberger in 1989–1990. Akkurt
modeled the response of the tool, running the
FIR-CPMG pulse sequence, to layered formations
of various descriptions. He found that T1 results
were erratic, depending on the exact position of
the tool with respect to a bed boundary at the start
of a pulse sequence. In contrast, the computed T2
logs were well behaved, varying smoothly and con-
sistently at bed boundaries (30,33). This confirmed
T2 as the primary borehole measurement.

NMR PROPERTIES OF ROCKS
While hardware development was proceeding,
there was an acute awareness of the need to
develop methods to understand the data the log-
ging tool would collect. There was a sense of
minor frustration because it was suspected that a
lot of the needed information was locked away in
confidential oil company files. Lacking the key to
unlock those files, Schlumberger launched a major
effort to measure and understand NMR proper-
ties of rocks. Four distinct avenues were pursued:
petrophysical correlations, studies of the mech-
anism of relaxation at the pore–grain interface,
studies of diffusion in porous media, and imaging.
The study of petrophysical correlations was
led by William Kenyon, Christian Straley, and
James Howard. A major theme was understand-
ing how nonexponential magnetization decays of
rocks related to quantities of interest to the oil
industry. NMR-derived pore size distributions of
rocks were compared to thin-section images and
mercury porosimetry measurements (34). A very
fruitful approach was to compare NMR relax-
ation time distributions before and after cen-
trifugation of water-filled rocks. This established
a correlation between borehole NMR measure-
ments and capillary-bound (nonproducible) water
in oil reservoirs, the basis of the most widespread
practical application of the borehole NMR tools
(35). Estimation of the fraction of capillary-bound
water has been extended more recently to rocks in
which water molecules can sample a bimodal pore
size distribution before being relaxed (36).
It is well known that NMR relaxation times of
bulk fluids vary strongly with temperature (37).
The PNMT group was afraid that the petrophys-
ical correlations developed by their colleagues on
the basis of laboratory measurements at 40◦ C
would be useless at hydrocarbon reservoir temper-
atures, which can be as high as 175◦ C. A simple
but effective high temperature wind tunnel and a
pressure vessel capable of maintaining water in its
liquid state at high temperature were constructed
by Lawrence Latour and used to measure the tem-
perature dependence of T1 and T2 of water-filled
rocks between 25◦ and 175◦ C. To the amazement
of the Schlumberger group, little or no temper-
ature dependence was found, at least not in the
small group of randomly selected rocks used in
the investigation (38). This was the central obser-
vation that led to a theory of NMR relaxation of
fluids at a fluid–solid interface (39,40).
NMR WELL LOGGING AT SCHLUMBERGER 401
The third major focus of the NMR group at
Schlumberger in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s
was on restricted diffusion of fluids in porous
media. A large effort was devoted to research in
this area. P. Sen, P. P. Mitra, and L. M. Schwartz
led the effort on the theoretical side, while E. J.
Fordham, L. L. Latour, M. D. Hurlimann, and I
were the principal contributors on the experimen-
tal side. Imaging of rocks during drainage or filtra-
tion was pursued in large measure by E. J. Ford-
ham, L. M. Schwartz, and C. Straley, as well as by
many groups outside of Schlumberger. A review
of the extensive results of these investigations is
outside the scope of this history.
COMMERCIAL TOOLS
The prototype PNMT tool built at Schlumberger–
Doll Research was designed strictly for laboratory
use. It could not survive immersion in a bath-
tub, let alone in a borehole filled with hot salt
water or oil. For the purposes of building bore-
hole prototypes and for eventual commercializa-
tion, the project was transferred to Schlumberger
Engineering in Houston in 1988.
Engineering retained the Research design while
introducing many refinements. The center mag-
net shown in Fig. 4.3 was not essential and was
removed to make room for electronic circuits.
The magnets were segmented and the magneti-
zation vector of each segment was adjusted to
optimize the magnetic field profile. The antenna
efficiency was improved and the deadtime was
reduced. There was a steady improvement in the
electronics. Roughly speaking, the signal-to-noise
ratio improved by 1 dB per year; there is a story
connected with each decibel. The experimental
prototype of the renamed combinable magnetic
resonance (CMR) tool logged its first client well
in Lea County, NM on 15 December 1991. A
year-long North American field test campaign fol-
lowed (41). Four copies of the engineering pro-
totype tool went into worldwide service early in
1995, followed rapidly by a full production run.
Practical experience in the oilfield prompted
important improvements in both measurement
technique and interpretation of borehole NMR
data. These efforts were led in large measure by
Robert Freedman and Chris Morriss in Houston,
and Charles Flaum in Ridgefield. Harold Vinegar
of Shell was responsible for many ingenious and
practical innovations. Martin Hurlimann defini-
tively modeled the spin dynamics of the tool. A
402 THE HISTORY OF NMR WELL LOGGING
second-generation tool, of the same basic design
but with longer magnets and an improved mea-
surement procedure, went into service in 2000
(42).
Ever since the Schlumberger brothers invented
well logging in the early part of the twentieth cen-
tury, it has been necessary to stop drilling and
extract miles of drill pipe before the well log-
ging instruments can be lowered into the bore-
hole on a cable. The expensive drilling rig stood
idle while the measurements were being made. In
the 1990’s, logging-while-drilling made its appear-
ance. Sections of drill pipe immediately above the
drill bit are replaced by measuring instruments in
very strong steel housings. Data are stored in com-
puter memory, which is uploaded whenever the
drill bit is returned to the surface for replacement.
There is also a very limited real-time teleme-
try capability. NMR is the latest technology to
be implemented in logging-while-drilling systems.
Measurements are very difficult due to the vio-
lent motion and severe shocks associated with the
drilling process, but some simple NMR measure-
ments can be made (43).
Schlumberger continues to improve its NMR
technology. The veterans of the 1980’s have
been augmented by new groups of researchers in
both Ridgefield and Houston. Recent advances
in instrument design, measurement methodology,
and signal processing, not yet published, inspire
humility in this author.
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SUMMARY OF PART 4
Following the Los Alamos project, Schlumberger
also developed a new magnet/RF coil configura-
tion. Their magnet geometry evolved from the
Los Alamos configuration, but is an accepted tool
that produces a long, slender region of homoge-
neous B0 field inside the formation. Schlumberger
has long been a pioneer in well logging technol-
ogy and has successfully marketed their new com-
bined magnetic resonanceTM logging tool in the
petroleum industry. These new logging tools led
to the development of new data acquisition and
handling techniques that took advantage of their
capabilities. These are described in Part 5.