This study characterizes an Albian carbonate reservoir of oilfield B in the Campos Basin, based on geophysical well logs and laboratory petrophysical data. The use of current approaches to characterize reservoirs allowed us to estimate the porosity, permeability, and water saturation of this reservoir in a more reliable way than when this oilfield was discovered in 1976. To achieve this goal, the cluster analysis for rock typing module of the Interactive Petrophysics software was used to divide the succession into 11 electrofacies. Using log and laboratory data, an equation was derived to determine the porosity and the permeability of each electrofacies through the multiple linear regression technique. The results were compared with different models proposed by other authors, with the best results being found with multiple linear regression. Water saturation, on the other hand, was estimated by the Archie (The electrical resistivity log as an aid in determining some reservoir characteristics, Petroleum Transactions of AIME , 146:54–62, 1942) equation after identifying the cementation coefficient with the Pickett (A review of current techniques for determination of water saturation from logs, Journal of Petroleum Technology 18:1425–1433, 1966) cross plot. Finally, the porosity and permeability data were again used to identify three main flow units in the reservoir through the Winland (Oil accumulation in response to pore size changes, Weyburn field, Saskatchewan. Amoco Production Company Report F72-G-25, 20 p., 1972) graph. To verify the effectiveness of the adopted methodology, it was applied (successfully) in a test well, defining porosity, permeability, water saturation, and flow units, where laboratory data were absent.

Total scattering experiments using high-energy synchrotron X-rays and spallation neutrons are providing new insights into the structures of nanoscale and poorly crystalline materials of environmental and mineralogical relevance. The pair distribution function (PDF) derived from these total scattering data is a real-space depiction of the atomic arrangements over short (<3–5 Å), intermediate (up to ~20 Å), and even longer length scales. Structural information can be extracted both directly from the PDF and through modelling. PDF analysis approaches are described using selected examples of natural and synthetic nanoparticles as well as a sample that is a mixture of amorphous and crystalline structural phases. Several applications include combined analysis of the real- and reciprocal-space forms of the scattering data. Greater application of the total scattering and PDF methods to environmental minerals that are nanoscale and poorly crystallized will provide new insight to structure, including structural disorder at different length scales, and help to develop further structure-property relationships.