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.”
A proposal on the fast track
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…