Gearbox Repair in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana

Calcasieu Parish sits in the far southwest corner of Louisiana, first in line when you cross the state border from Texas on Interstate 10. Lake Charles is the parish seat and the center of gravity, with Sulphur and Westlake forming the industrial corridor on the west side of the Calcasieu River. For its size, the parish carries an outsized share of the state economy: parish GDP reached $18.4 billion in 2024, one of the largest parish economies in Louisiana outside the New Orleans and Baton Rouge metros, per the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

That output does not come from offices. It comes from refineries, ethylene crackers, polymer plants, and LNG terminals strung along the Calcasieu Ship Channel, and every one of those facilities runs on rotating equipment: cooling tower gear drives, pump and blower gearboxes, mixer and agitator reducers, extruder drives, crane and hoist gearing. Machines like that wear out on a schedule the OEM catalog does not respect, which is where we come in.

Calcasieu Parish anchors our coverage east of the state line. For the rest of the state, including Baton Rouge, Geismar, and the lower Mississippi River corridor, start at our Louisiana gearbox repair service areas page.

Start with refining. CITGO's Lake Charles refinery, the cornerstone of its network, has run on the Calcasieu Ship Channel since 1944 and processes 479,000 barrels of crude per day with about 2,400 employees and contractors, per CITGO. A few minutes west, Phillips 66 operates a 249,000 barrel per day refinery in Westlake producing gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, per Phillips 66. Packed together with the chemical complexes around them, the corridor from Sulphur through Westlake to Lake Charles ranks among the densest refining and petrochemical clusters on the Gulf Coast, per NS Energy.

The chemical side is just as heavy. Sasol's complex adjacent to Lake Charles, built for more than $8 billion, includes an ethane cracker producing 1.5 million tons of ethylene a year plus six chemical manufacturing plants, with roughly 1,200 employees on the complex, per Sasol. LOTTE Chemical dedicated a $3.1 billion ethylene glycol complex in the Lake Charles area in 2019, per Louisiana Economic Development. In Sulphur, Westlake Corporation, a company founded in Lake Charles in 1986, produces ethylene, styrene, and polyethylene, and employs more than 3,200 people across its Louisiana plant locations, per Louisiana Economic Development.

Then there is the build out still underway. Woodside Energy's $17.5 billion Louisiana LNG project in Calcasieu Parish, the largest foreign direct investment in Louisiana history, reached its final investment decision in April 2025, will produce up to 16.5 million tonnes of LNG per year, and is expected to create about 15,000 construction jobs, with roughly 1,800 workers already on site in 2026, per Louisiana Economic Development. Every operation on that list depends on the machines we rebuild: cooling tower and pump drives in the refineries, mixer and agitator reducers and planetary gearboxes in the chemical plants, extruder gearboxes on the polyethylene lines, and the crane wheels and hoist gearing that move heavy maintenance loads across all of them.

Southwest Louisiana runs equipment that has outlived its paperwork. A refinery that has operated since the 1940s carries gear drives whose original manufacturers merged, sold the product line, or disappeared decades ago, and whose drawings no longer exist anywhere. That is the exact job this shop was built for. We reverse engineer the gearing from the worn parts themselves and cut new gears in house, so a unit nobody supports anymore comes back to life without waiting on an OEM that no longer answers.

The rest of the case is simple. Solution Gear Co. is family owned and has rebuilt gearboxes for over 20 years, and everything happens in one building: the people who quote your job are the same people who run the teardown, the machining, the assembly, and the loaded test run. Nothing is brokered out. A complete rebuild can save you up to 50 percent versus the OEM purchase price, every rebuild carries up to a 24 month workmanship warranty, and the 24 hour line means a Saturday night failure on the channel gets a human, not a voicemail. For plants where a single idle drive can stall a cracker or hold a ship at the dock, that combination is the whole argument.