DGR*Grant Construction Inc. of Richland has been awarded a $9.5 million contract to build a new two-story office building at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland.

Construction is expected to begin in February on the 26,000-sq.-ft. facility, which will house more than 100 PNNL staff who work on energy and national security research.

The office will be built on the north end of the PNNL campus in north Richland, near the corner of Stevens Drive and Horn Rapids Road. The facility was designed by MMEC Architecture of Kennewick and Spokane.

PNNL staff estimated that they new office building will cost approximately $9.5 million to design, build and furnish. It 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. That high-security building has control rooms, testing platforms and laboratories used to address grid modernization, building efficiency, renewable energy integration and other energy challenges.

In addition, a 16,000-sq.-ft. general purpose chemistry laboratory is currently under construction and will open in March.

DGR*Grant Construction is also the general contractor on that project, which will feature 10 chemistry labs and several workstations for researchers to use while conducting experiments. It is being built on the north end of PNNL’s core campus, near the corner of Stevens Drive and Horn Rapids Road, adjacent to the recently completed Systems Engineering Laboratory.

Founded in 1065, PNNL employs approximately 4,400 people and has an annual budget reaching nearly $1 billion. It is managed by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.