COLLINSVILLE, SOLANO COUNTY—A few miles down the Sacramento River from the small town of Rio Vista lies a 6.5-mile stretch of undeveloped riverbank that California Forever calls “the perfect location” for the nation’s largest shipyard. If the billionaire-backed development company, best known for planning a controversial 400,000-person city in Solano County, succeeds, this area will be transformed from a riverside grassland into an industrial zone. Here, laborers—or robotic systems—will work and weld metal, cut steel, install engines and wiring systems, apply anti-fouling paint, and so forth to produce (in the current vision) high-tech, crewless autonomous vessels that have been deemed a U.S. naval priority. 

California Forever says the shipyard will bring a windfall of jobs and potentially $93 million in local tax revenue to a struggling region, and alongside local and state officials, is pushing to build the shipyard as soon as possible. “We have not had a chance to land a WHALE of a project like this since Tesla more than a decade ago,” wrote Gabrielle Stevenson, associate deputy director of business development for the Governor’s Office of Business Development (GO-BIZ) in emails discussing the shipyard. 

Yet even while California Forever has pushed to skip new environmental reviews, it has offered few or shifting details on what the infrastructure will be and how it might impact the Delta’s delicate biodiversity, Bay Nature has found. When asked for an interview on its environmental impacts, California Forever spokesperson Julia Blystone referred Bay Nature to an environmental impact report for Solano County’s 2008 general plan. That plan designated the area for “water-dependent industrial usage,” but did not specifically contemplate shipbuilding in its definition of the term.

Construction would transform an area that has never seen major development. While ecologists and advocates say the shipyard site itself has minimal ecological value, it lies less than two miles from the restored Montezuma Wetlands, as well as Suisun Marsh, one of the largest remaining intact marshes on the West Coast. “Placing industry next to one of the last wildest areas in the San Francisco area, hands down, it’s just a bad idea,” says John Durand, an ecologist at UC Davis who has surveyed the river’s biodiversity for years. But what kind of bad idea, Durand notes, “all depends on the details.” 

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This is only the latest industrial proposal for this riverbank along the Montezuma Hills. Over the last 60 years, companies have envisioned using it for nuclear plants, coal plants, chemical factories, or steel manufacturing. All failed, for different reasons—school district battles, lawsuits, market downturns. A 1989 study assessed the possibility of heavy industry or a marine terminal at the site and concluded, “Its great size is its only competitive advantage at present.” But the area’s water-dependent infrastructure designation was affirmed in Solano County’s 2008 general plan. 

Now, California Forever aims to establish the area as “Port Alpha”—a project by Texas-based shipbuilding startup Saronic Technologies (which shares investor Marc Andreessen with California Forever) for a shipyard that could start churning out autonomous vessels more than 1,000 feet long, possibly as soon as 2028. “Our client’s priority is speed,” wrote Stevenson in August 2025 emails discussing the shipyard. Saronic Technologies has more than $400 million in Navy contracts, and is choosing between Brownsville, Texas, and the Bay Area for the new shipyard. These naval deadlines, California Forever says, mean the shipyard must move fast. 

California Forever—alongside the Solano County Economic Development Corporation, whose officials declined a request for an interview; Governor’s Office of Business Development, whose officials declined an on-the-record interview; and local maritime groups—have pushed for new tax breaks and regulatory waivers for maritime industry in the region. California Forever has struck a 40-year agreement with building trade unions that include the shipyard’s construction. Saronic brought Suisun City’s mayor and city manager out to visit its Louisiana facilities (and had them sign non-disclosure agreements about the trip). With help from GO-BIZ, California Forever lobbied for state legislation to reshape the area zoned for water-dependent infrastructure—and allow the developers to use the 2008 county general plan’s environmental impact report instead of getting a new California Environmental Quality Act environmental impact report. “Any new EIR is guaranteed to be litigated,” wrote Sramek in emails discussing the project in August 2025. 

That environmental impact report stated that any project at the proposed shipyard site would need its own environmental impact analysis to assess site-specific impacts. The report concluded that any construction at the site would result in “significant” impacts on marsh and riparian habitat. These impacts could be downgraded to “less than significant” with enough wetland monitoring and purchases of mitigation banks.

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Scant details, no obvious analogues

There are few analogues for assessing the environmental impact of a shipyard like this—and few details about this shipyard to extrapolate from. No new shipyards of this size have been built on undeveloped land in the U.S. in a very long time; most new shipyards have taken over existing industrial facilities. “Jan [Sramek’s] Twitter posts are the closest thing we have to what the site could potentially look like,” says Nate Huntington, a resilience manager with the Greenbelt Alliance and a member of Solano Together, a community group opposing California Forever. (Sramek is the CEO of California Forever.) Sramek’s posts show a 7,500-acre shipyard where multiple shipbuilders could work alongside each other. Even this size is a four-fold increase from California Forever’s first press release, which put the shipyard at 1,400 acres, the area currently zoned for maritime industrial use.

How big the ships are and how they are built will determine the shipyard’s impact on the area, from whether or not the river channel must be dredged deeper to what pollutants it releases, says Durand. Building those very large ships at the shipyard—like Saronic’s envisioned Panamax-class vessels—could mean dredging this sensitive stretch of 30-foot deep water more than 10 feet deeper, according to the 1989 county report. Solano County officials said in a public meeting that Saronic wanted to locate its operation by a channel at least 50 feet deep. The U.S. shipyards now building Panamax-class vessels—such as the Philly Shipyard—look out onto waters maintained at 40 feet deep, or deeper. Saronic’s largest vessel in construction right now is 180 feet long. California Forever has said that other shipbuilders, like cargo container ship manufacturers, have privately expressed interest in coming to Solano.

Historically, shipbuilding hasn’t been great for nature. Its environmental impact is normally similar to most other heavy industries, says Andrew Von Ah, the director of physical infrastructure for the U.S. Government Accountability Office, who has written reports on the state of commercial shipbuilding and autonomous vessel regulations in the United States. A report from the One Ocean Foundation, a global advocacy nonprofit, details the issues: The blasting, metalworking, painting, air heating devices, solvents, and pressure-washing that go into putting a ship together all result in tons of toxic wastewater and vast amounts of air pollution. If improperly managed, it can all leave lasting impacts on the environment. 

That happened, elsewhere in Solano County, at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, a Superfund site; despite more than $290 million spent on remediation, it remains contaminated 30 years since major shipbuilding efforts ended, says Robin Leong, a birder who led the Solano Breeding Bird Atlas in 2014 and worked at the shipyard for decades before its closure. “They never got it super clean,” she says. Today, shipbuilding and ship repair contribute an estimated 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. 

The One Ocean report notes, though, that emerging shipbuilding techniques—sandblasting instead of power-washing, using less-toxic paints, automating processes—can reduce the industry’s environmental impact, if engineers commit to thinking about ecosystems through the life cycle of a ship. A previous proposed facility by Saronic in Texas drew public opposition over the tons of hazardous fumes that it would emit each year. In a presentation to the Cameron County Commissioners Court in Brownsville, Texas, one of the other sites Saronic is considering for Port Alpha, representatives told the court that Saronic’s redesigned shipbuilding processes, such as robotic welding, can result in emissions up to 70% lower than traditional shipyards. The county judge compared the shipyard’s environmental impact to a car factory. 

None of Saronic’s other facilities have operated for long enough to have a long public track record of their environmental impacts. Nor has this kind of autonomous shipbuilding existed long enough to be regulated: the U.S. Coast Guard, which regulates the operation of commercial vessels, including their environmental impacts, “is dealing with it as it comes,” says Von Ah.

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Delta ‘hanging on by a thread’

Every potential environmental impact would ripple into an ecosystem “hanging by a thread,” says Elizabeth Patterson, a former Benicia mayor who helped found the Delta Protection Commission, a state agency charged with protecting the estuary’s environment. Delta ecosystems have spent decades battered by invasive species, saltwater intrusion, and climate change. “The first thing you would want to do when somebody is in the ICU is to stop hurting them,” says Patterson. “So do no harm.”

The shipyard site looks out on where the freshwater river transitions into the saltier Bay. Six endangered fish species live in the river, including the all-but-vanished Delta smelt. Durand notes few of those fish actually use the riverbank where the shipyard will be. But many swim by. “All our salmon go past this area… it’s their choke point,” Durand says. Any pollution from shipbuilding will make their watery world a little worse, he fears. As new roads are built and traffic increases, chemicals from tires and industry could wash off them into the river and enter neighboring Suisun Marsh and the Montezuma Wetlands as well. With water intakes just downstream, any pollution, Durand says, would “go into the marsh directly.”

Dredging the river like this would result in even wider environmental impacts, says environmental advocates. “That is a very ugly thing to get into,” says Bruce Herbold, a retired Environmental Protection Agency ecologist who helped get the Delta smelt federally listed as endangered. Patterson wrote in a 2025 op-ed that dredging could introduce more salt water into the Delta—turning freshwater ecosystems salty, affecting water quality for millions of people, and devastating vast swaths of agriculture—and likely unearth mercury buried in the sediment from Gold Rush days. California Forever notes on its website that Panamax-class vessels pass by the shipyard site every day; they head up the manmade Sacramento Deepwater Channel to the Port of West Sacramento. 

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A year on from its first public announcement, so much of the shipyard proposal remains nebulous. For certain, though, this development would transform the life people have lived for decades in this rural slice of the Bay Area. 40 years ago, Jim and Jan Bartz moved to a small blue house in the tiny hamlet of Collinsville, about two miles down from the proposed shipyard’s site. They never left. Every summer evening, the Bartzes sit outside their house and watch the bats fly out from the roost they built.

Since California Forever’s plans became public, the two have become fixtures at public comment meetings, where they sing protest songs composed by Jim, a longtime banjo player. In a September 9, 2025, meeting at which Solano County supervisors debated whether to support state shipbuilding legislation, he sang “Tule Canoe,” to the tune of “Gum Tree Canoe,” an American folk song from the 1800s. “Through the ripples of history and the rising high tides, we could all look much deeper into each other’s eyes,” he sang. “We’re all in the same boat with the same river view, so I’m paddlin’ and chann’lin’ the Miwoks and you.”