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The longest underground rail tunnel in the world has been under construction in the Alps for a decade - but it won't open until 2032 at the earliest.

The Brenner Base Tunnel (BBT) is a 30-mile-long, $11B mega-project on the border of Italy and Austria that cuts underneath the Alps. For a number of reasons that are both political and technical it won't be finished for another decade. A closer look at the challenges the EU is facing in building the tunnel echo those that the rest of the world must confront in order to build infrastructure that meets its climate, security, and mega-project goals.

But first some background: the Trans-European Transport Network, or the TEN-T, is an infrastructure plan that the EU launched in the 1990s to better connect the continent through 9 main trade corridors. The Brenner Pass is a critical bottleneck along the longest of those corridors, which links North Sea ports in Scandinavia with those to the south in the Mediterranean. It is also a critical node that ties together the $4T and $2T German and Italian economies. (For example, in 2020, Italy exported nearly $90B in goods to Germany while importing $80B worth.)