Gearbox Repair in Jefferson County, Texas

Jefferson County sits at the far eastern end of the Texas Gulf Coast, and no county in the state leans harder on heavy industry. County GDP reached $27.1 billion in 2024, per U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data via FRED, and manufacturing accounts for almost 47 percent of that output, the most manufacturing dependent large county economy in Texas, anchored by petroleum refining and petrochemicals, per the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. In the Southeast Texas region around Beaumont, manufacturing provides 12.8 percent of jobs and $14 billion of regional GDP, with average manufacturing wages of $86,600 per year, per the same Comptroller study.

Beaumont, the county seat, and Port Arthur are tied together by the Sabine-Neches Waterway, the nation's third busiest waterway by cargo tonnage at more than 100 million tons a year and the top U.S. waterway for bulk liquid cargo, per a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Sabine-Neches Navigation District overview. Every mill, dock, and process unit on that corridor turns on gearing, and that gearing wears out.

Jefferson County is the eastern anchor of our Gulf Coast coverage. For the counties between here and our shop, and for the rest of the markets we serve across the state, see our Texas service areas page.

Roughly 1.9 million barrels per day of crude refining capacity is packed into this one county across four refineries: Motiva Port Arthur, ExxonMobil Beaumont, Valero Port Arthur, and TotalEnergies Port Arthur, per the U.S. Energy Information Administration Refinery Capacity Report. Motiva's plant became the largest single U.S. refinery at 640,500 barrels per calendar day as of January 1, 2025, per the EIA, on a site Motiva says has grown from 25 acres in 1903 to 1,400 acres today. Across the county line of sight in Beaumont, ExxonMobil finished a $2 billion expansion in March 2023 that added 250,000 barrels per day and pushed the refinery past 630,000, per ExxonMobil, a startup the EIA called the largest single addition to Gulf Coast refining capacity in years.

The rest of the roster is just as demanding on equipment. Valero's Port Arthur refinery runs 435,000 barrels per day of heavy sour crude with roughly 770 employees and houses one of the company's two renewable diesel plants, per Valero. TotalEnergies operates a 238,000 barrel per day refinery integrated with its Gulf Coast petrochemicals platform, per TotalEnergies. The newest arrival, Golden Pass LNG at Sabine Pass, produced its first LNG on March 30, 2026, per Golden Pass LNG, with additional trains starting up through 2027. Beyond the refineries, the county hosts BASF, Arkema, Chemtrade, Goodyear synthetic rubber, OCI, and the Jefferson Energy terminals, and chemical manufacturing employment in Southeast Texas runs more than 4.5 times its nationwide share, per the Texas Comptroller.

All of that translates directly to our bench. Refineries and chemical plants send us cooling tower drives, pump rebuilds, and mixer and agitator reducers. Terminal cranes and bulk handlers wear out crane wheels, hoist drives, and planetary gearboxes. ExxonMobil's Beaumont polyethylene site, which reached roughly 1.7 million tons of annual capacity after a 2019 expansion per ExxonMobil, and the county's rubber and chemical compounders run exactly the kind of extruder gearboxes and screw and barrel sets we specialize in rebuilding.

In a county where manufacturing is nearly half the economy, downtime is not an inconvenience, it is lost product measured by the hour. Solution Gear Co. is family owned and has been rebuilding gearboxes for over 20 years, and the structure of the business is the advantage: the people who quote your Beaumont or Port Arthur job are the same people who machine the shafts, cut the gears, pour the babbitt, and test run the finished unit. Nothing is brokered to a third party, so nothing slips between the promise and the work.

That independence matters most on the units nobody else will touch. Refinery and terminal equipment in this county spans a century of installations, and plenty of it outlived its manufacturer. When OEM drawings do not exist, we reverse engineer the gearing from the worn parts and cut new gears in house. When an OEM quotes a replacement lead time measured in months, a rebuild from us can save up to 50 percent versus the purchase price and come back in a fraction of the time. Every rebuild is test run before it ships and backed by up to a 24 month workmanship warranty.