Editor’s note: Yesterday, guest contributor Alexis Madrigal introduced the rationale behind California’s ethanol mandate, and alluded to some of the “behind-the-scenes” changes that the mandate required. Today, he takes a look at one piece of the California ethanol infrastructure.

II. The Geography of Green

In northern California, the major incoming station for ethanol is the NuStar Selby Terminal outside Crockett, in unincorporated Contra Costa County.

At places like Selby, rail cars filled with ethanol are unloaded into holding tanks, then eventually transloaded into a truck (or a pipeline) that delivers the fuel to a refinery. The Big Oil refiners splash-blend it with hydrocarbons inside tanker trucks into what the state calls gasoline.

That’s one of the things that Selby’s manager, Mike McDonald got shipped to California to do, after his last post at a refinery in the Caribbean. He’s sturdily-built with closely cropped hair. In his blue coveralls, it’s obvious he’s no suit or hipster. When I show up uninvited at Selby early one evening, after weeks of trying to get the NuStar press handlers to call me back, I catch McDonald still working.

And why wouldn’t he be? Selby never stops working. The terminal operates 24-hours a day, 365 days a year. It can store three million gallons of liquid fuels, the vast majority of it being oil.

McDonald’s office is a trailer that sits in the shadow of a farm of gleaming white tanks. A random strip of suburban-looking houses lies across the parking lot, the remains of the old company town of Tormey, which was run by the American Smelting and Refining Company, and largely razed in 1971 when the plant closed along with its 610-foot chimney, once the world’s tallest.

A local later tells me that the lead coming out of the stack was killing horses in Benicia, miles away. “That was back then, though,” he notes appreciatively.

Now the big employer in the area is the C&H Sugar Factory, a couple miles down the road from Selby in Crockett proper. The work never stops there, either. At night, it stays lit-up, almost magical, its machinery convoluted, its processes obscure.

Families play bocce in the warm evenings, the factory rising above them. Down by the port, people fish the waters a mile from where the old smokestack stood. Classic cars sit on lawns, half restored. Despite all this retro civic activity, the town isn’t frozen in time. On the random Wednesday I visited, a local bar, Toot’s, featured a DJ playing hip hop to a small, drunk, tattooed crowd.

27 miles from San Francisco, the epicenter of a green movement trying to change the world, and one mile from a fuel terminal that’s an important node of an equally global but far-less-liberal network, Crockett is just one of many exurban towns ringing our big cities that have become the new battlegrounds in the fight to change how we drive and live.

To push beyond token changes to the energy system, the green movement has to penetrate all the way out to places like this. Guys like McDonald might not have to convert, but they will have to help design the new industrial processes required for a cleaner world.

The geography of green will have to look more like a map of the nation’s rails and highways and less like the store locating app for Whole Foods. The dirty work doesn’t just occur when oil comes out of the ground or is burned in a car. The points in-between matter.

Tomorrow: How to move a billion gallons of fuel from Iowa to California at Gas 2.0.

Image credit: Alexis Madrigal (madrigaelic) at Flickr under a Creative Commons license.