A contract has been awarded to DGR*Grant Construction Inc. of Richland to build a new, two-story office building at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The 26,000-square-foot facility will house over 100 PNNL staff engaged in energy and national security research.

Construction is set to begin in February 2016 and will be complete in early 2017. The office building will be located on the north end of PNNL's core campus in Richland near the corner of Stevens Drive and Horn Rapids Road. It was designed by MMEC Architecture of Kennewick and Spokane, Wash.

The new facility will cost approximately $9.5 million to design, construct and furnish, and will include 53 offices, 64 cubicles and four conference rooms.

The building is part of an ongoing campus strategy to acquire, modernize and sustain facilities and infrastructure to further enable core research and development capabilities at PNNL. As part of this strategy, PNNL opened its new Systems Engineering Building in August, which houses control rooms, testing platforms and laboratories used to address grid modernization, buildings efficiency, renewable energy integration and other energy challenges.

A 16,000-square foot general purpose chemistry laboratory is currently under construction and will open in March. Laboratories in this facility will be used to support a variety of DOE-funded programs and research.