With the political candidates all talking about energy independence and the rapid changes that they'll bring to the nation's industries, I wanted to point you to a freelance feature I wrote about California's ethanol-importing infrastructure.

Built around California's decision to change the formulation of its gasoline to include ethanol as an anti-smog additive, my takeaway from this 3,500 word feature – crowdfunded through Spot.Us – is that making even small changes to the infrastructure we've built over the last 50 years will be immensely difficult.

In particular, people working in clean tech tend to forget that there is a whole legacy fuel distribution infrastructure – the midstream, it's called – that is built from steel and concrete. It won't topple as easily as the old media distribution outlets have in the Internet age.

As one of my main sources, a young Berkeley-trained engineer told me, "Everybody is excited about cleantech and having some wiz bang widget, but it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about algae or jatropha biodiesel or switch-grass cellulosic ethanol. None of it matters unless you can get it to market.”

With tight oil supplies and climate change concerns rightly driving investment into new fuels and transportation modes, it's worth taking a look at what had to happen so that Californians could start putting a billion gallons of a new fuel into their gas tanks.

So, regardless of what you think of ethanol, if you're interested in pipelines and rail terminals, exurban towns and storage tanks, check out the article: Changing Locomotion in Midstream.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.