Some readers may have gotten hooked, as I did, on Three Body Problem, an imaginative sort-of sci-fi TV series with an intriguing premise: Humanity needs to organize in earnest right now to fend off an invasion of super-intelligent aliens that won’t happen for 400 years.

So, being fiction, the nations of the world immediately pull together, muster vast resources and launch a shot-in-the-dark mission to foil the aliens, who, incidentally, are watching every move humankind makes.

This scenario, oddly enough, got me thinking of the daunting odds facing a major energy project in Canada. Though not quite on the same scale of challenge as thwarting future alien invaders, building the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion in Western Canada seemed just as improbable a decade ago.

This week, if all goes as planned, the first load of about half a million barrels of oil from Alberta’s “tar sands” will gush into a tanker docked in a brand new terminal near Vancouver, British Columbia, destined for China.

The project mission, in a nutshell, was to build a brand new, higher volume pipeline along the 1,150 km route of an existing pipeline from Alberta to B.C. The new pipeline essentially triples the capacity from 300,000 barrels a day to 890,000 barrels a day.

The main significance of this is that Canadian oil producers will have greater access to markets around the world and wean themselves off dependence on shrinking U.S. markets.

Sounds simple, n’est-ce pas? Hardly. In fact, determined opposition from environmentalists and some Indigenous communities, on top of soaring cost projections, became just too much of a flaming ball of trouble for the pipeline owner Kinder Morgan.

Five years after it first got approval in principle for the project, Kinder Morgan bailed, and six years ago this week, the federal government of Justin Trudeau bought the pipeline for $4.5 billion. Construction work resumed in November 2019.

Buying the pipeline was, to say the least, a hot potato for a young government trying to establish itself as a world leader in the battle against climate change. Though he was not yet elected as a Liberal, the decision gave pause to Steve Guilbault, the man who is currently environment minister. He was known previously as an eco activist who in 2002 climbed Toronto’s CN Tower to draw attention to environmental issues.

The government justified the pipeline purchase on environmental and economic grounds. Transporting oil by pipeline would dramatically reduce transport by riskier, greenhouse gas-producing means such as rail or tanker-truck. One estimate projects the daily shipment of oil on the new line will reduce rail tanker traffic by 1,300 cars.