Analysis of rotating equipment failures in Venezuelan refin- eries: the impact of absent preventive maintenance of pump and compressor systems of the paraguaná complex on refining reliability

The Paraguaná Refining Center, the union of the Amuay and Cardón refineries on Venezuela's Paraguaná peninsula and historically among the largest refining complexes in the world, has undergone a reliability collapse without precedent in the modern downstream industry, culminating in events such as the 2012 Amuay vapor cloud explosion — more than fifty fatalities, damage exceeding one billion US dollars, and an origin traced to a hydrocarbon leak following a pump-related containment failure (Sajid et al., 2021). The aim of this article is to explain and quantify how the systematic absence of preventive maintenance of pump and compressor sys- tems translates into the degradation of refining reliability. The research applies a mixed method- ological approach: a structured synthesis of the failure-mode and condition-monitoring literature for refinery rotating equipment; a documentary reconstruction of the maintenance-deprivation context of Venezuelan refining after 2013; and a model-based reliability simulation of a repre- sentative Paraguaná-scale rotating-equipment population, whose parameters are anchored to published failure data — bearing-dominated pump failure distributions of approximately 38%, Weibull characteristic lives of 510–657 operating days, and valve-dominated compressor failure structures of approximately 36% (Silva et al., 2023; Lv et al., 2021). The original contribution of the article is the Cumulative Maintenance Deficit Index (CMDI) — a criticality-weighted measure of unexecuted scheduled maintenance accumulated over time — together with an empirically fitted exponential degradation law, λ(t) = λ0·exp(κ·CMDI), which on the simulated dataset yields κ = 2.14 (95% CI: 1.87–2.41) with R2 = 0.93, implying that each 0.32 increment of maintenance deficit approximately doubles the failure intensity of the rotating-equipment population. Key findings: reliability decline under maintenance deprivation is strongly nonlinear; the failure-mode structure shifts from wear-out of monitored components toward systemic lubrication, sealing, and auxiliary failures; and workforce emigration acts as an independent degradation channel that spare-parts availability alone cannot offset (Garcia Zea, 2020; Gonyora & Ventura-Medina, 2024). All simulation outputs are explicitly model-generated and are intended as a transferable analytical template to be repopulated with plant data.