The Incredible Thinking Man

Read more about the Schlumberger Micro-Electronic-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) center in France.

If you’ve come here to meet Eric Donzier, you won’t need a magnifying glass. He is a Frenchman of above-average height and a frequent smile. You can’t miss him. But the eyeglass could come in handy if you intend to inspect the tiny devices Donzier and his team have designed and manufactured here over the last four years. Then you’re going to need a good one, because at the Schlumberger Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) Center in Elancourt, France, everything is getting smaller. And smaller. And smaller.

Eyes alight, Donzier explains: “To make a good sensor, it is not always necessary to make a big sensor. On the contrary, by dramatically reducing the size of downhole fluid analysis sensors, we have found that we can often produce dramatically more sensitive measurements, and we can do it for a lot less money.”

Hence the impetus behind the creation of MEMS back in 2003, by which time the oil and gas industry had finally begun to understand the potential importance of accurate, real-time downhole fluid analysis, which promises to be enabled by the increasing emergence of nanotechnology and wireless digital communications, among other scientific breakthroughs. Until then, the very history of the oilfield services business had been defined by the invention of a succession of large downhole tools, each with a different measurement function. The addition of each new type of measurement would necessarily lengthen the tool string, thereby increasing its vulnerability to failure.

But MEMS is changing all that, says Eric Donzier, by enabling the addition of several types of measurement to a single downhole tool without adding to the tool’s original length, and without changing the tool’s mechanical footprint. For example, Donzier points to the Modular Dynamic Tester (MDT), a formation pressure and fluid sampling tool that has been in Schlumberger’s portfolio for a quarter century. By creating micro-sensors that fit into existing spaces on the MDT’s mechanical footprint, MEMS offers the capacity to add measurements for density, temperature, viscosity, flow rate and CO2. Call it revolution by way of miniaturization.

“MEMS doesn’t just change the game. It changes our industry!” says Eric Donzier, peering intently at his visitor to ensure that the magnitude of his message has transmitted. “By making each of our existing tools a means for deploying all sorts of measurement technologies, we change everything—right down to the very physics that rule our tools. And in so doing, we save space, time and money to a degree previously undreamt of!”

(If you’re not a believer yet, hang around. Donzier and his eyes will make the sale soon enough….)

 Independence has been critical to the success of the MEMS business venture. Though financed by Schlumberger, the company has always been run as an independent entity. Thus, in a spirit of creative freedom, Donzier opted for geographic solitude when choosing a location. Rather than settle into a wing of our SRPC product center in Clamart, as might have seemed logical, he took up offices on a misty beet field-turned-industrial park 30 kilometers west of Paris. Just finding the place would test the limits of a military-grade GPS device. The nearest civilization of any recognizable sort is several kilometers distant. Yet it is here, in a bucolic cocoon, unfettered by the administrative distractions so common within large companies, that Donzier and his staff of 11 engineers and researchers have managed to quietly apply their miniaturization magic with resounding success. And so it is that after just four years of the company’s existence, MEMS technology is now found in the tools of every Schlumberger business segment.

On that note, I recommend that visitors not spend excessive amounts of time at the MEMS Center, if they are able to actually find the place. So powerful is the group’s argument for miniaturization that personally, after two hours in Eric Donzier’s presence, I could have sworn that my brain was shrinking. Clearly it was time for me to leave. If I stand any chance of keeping up with the MEMS Center’s next big leap in small, I’m going to need all the brains I’ve got.