Further, many wellbores prove to be difficult or even impossible to measure with conventional wireline tools, especially highly deviated wells.
With the improvement of the technology in the past decades, LWD is now widely used for drilling (including geosteering), and formation evaluation (especially for real time and high angle wells).
However, the main impetus to development was a decision by the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate to mandate the taking of a directional survey in wells offshore Norway every 100 meters.
This decision created an environment where MWD technology had an economic advantage over conventional mechanical TOTCO devices, and lead to rapid developments, including LWD, to add Gamma and Resistivity, by the early 1980s.
[4][5] LWD technology was originally developed to guarantee at least a basic data set in case high cost exploration wells could not be logged with wireline.