Falcon

Falcón State hosts the world's second-largest refinery complex—the 940,000 barrel/day Paraguaná Refining Center (Amuay and Cardón refineries)—which has become Venezuela's most concentrated example of infrastructure consuming itself through deferred maintenance. The facility suffered 29 oil spills in 2022 alone, with 32 spills in Falcón during 2023, demonstrating accelerating failure rates as decades of underinvestment compound.

The human and environmental costs are documented but unquantified. The 2012 Amuay explosion killed 48 and injured over 100. A Cardón tank rupture—maintenance not performed since 2016—released 3.6 million liters of gasoline into the Gulf of Venezuela. Underwater pipeline leaks recur every few weeks: January 2024 saw two spills within fifteen days near Paraguaná. The August 2024 El Palito spill (affecting Falcón's coast at Boca de Aroa and Tucacas) covered an area equivalent to 37,000 soccer fields.

Morrocoy National Park, a Caribbean marine sanctuary, has been repeatedly contaminated. "We have found fish full of oil when opened," report local observers. The fishing industry in Paraguaná Peninsula—once providing sustainable livelihoods—cannot survive recurring contamination of marine ecosystems.

The Political Ecology Observatory recorded these incidents without government acknowledgment or environmental damage quantification. PDVSA has not accounted for spills recurring since November 2019 nor released environmental studies. The pattern represents the inverse of typical resource extraction: rather than externalizing costs while extracting value, the infrastructure now generates costs without producing corresponding output.

By 2026, Falcón's trajectory depends on whether refinery rehabilitation can reverse the maintenance deficit or whether environmental accumulation damage makes the facility operationally unsustainable.