Berkeley Lab branches out
Richmond hopes new lab campus will help revitalize a barren section of city’s bay waterfront
Premium content from San Francisco Business Times by Blanca Torres, Reporter
Date: Friday, March 30, 2012, 3:00am PDT

Photo: LBNL / Roy Kaltschmidt
"You rarely get this opportunity to design a new campus," says Lawrence Berkeley lab exec Jay Keasling (left), with Bruce Darling.

Blanca Torres
Reporter - San Francisco Business Times
Officials from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory    envision transforming the Richmond Field Station from a dated, rundown assortment of buildings into a vibrant, modern and bustling waterfront campus.
Both the site and surrounding area could use a major revamp if that transformation is ever to take place.
“We want LBNL to be a catalyst for the surrounding area,” said Bill Lindsay, Richmond’s city manager. “Our commitment to them before they selected Richmond is that they wouldn’t be an island.”
The lab plans to build out up to 2 million square feet of office, lab and research and development space for a second campus where it will expand from its existing campus in Berkeley.
It selected Richmond in January after more than a year examining sites in several East Bay cities vying for the chance to land the second campus and the potential for thousands of jobs.
The lab estimates moving into the first phase of the campus in 2016. It has not released any details of the potential design, the development, or a specific budget for the project.
Step-by-step
The lab has plenty of work on its plate to develop the 100-acre Richmond site, which the University of California has owned since 1950 and uses for research space for the College of Engineering.
Approximately 266 people work at the facility, which sits along the San Francisco Bay shoreline west of Interstate 580.
According the lab’s original request for proposals, the campus development will take about a year, and construction on the first phase will likely take about two years.
The major steps include creating a master development plan, completing an environmental report, securing city approval and getting construction permits. Construction could start in late 2013.
The lab has not formally announced its design team, but it could include the firms that worked on the proposal for the Richmond site such as San Francisco developer SKS Investments, architecture firm SmithGroupJJR, WRT and McCarthy Construction. Representatives of those firms declined to comment for this article.
Lab officials have said the first phase will consist of a 320,000-square-foot facility to house the lab’s various biological science institutes, including the Joint Bioscience Energy Institute in Emeryville and the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek.
First things first
Those departments have about 800 workers, who would be the first to occupy the second campus.
“We welcome the opportunity to bring all of us together in one location so we can attack these really important problems we’re facing in areas of energy, environment and healthcare together as a group,” said Jay Keasling, the lab’s associate director for biosciences, when the Richmond site was announced.
The lab is part of a network of national laboratories founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a Nobel Prize-winning University of California, Berkeley    , physicist. The idea was to establish facilities to foster research and development and the commercialization of that technology.
The Regents of the University of California manage LBNL, but the lab is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy    . The lab’s budget for 2011 was $836 million with 4,200 employees.
Building lab facilities can cost between $500 and $1,000 per square foot depending on the complexity of the structures and equipment. That means the entire second campus could cost between $1 billion and $2 billion, while the first phase could require $160 million to $320 million.
The lab did not comment on its official cost estimates, but said through spokesman Jon Weiner that the lab expects to pay for the first phase with bonds that will be repaid through an occupancy charge.
The first phase alone could generate up to 600 construction jobs and 800 to 1,000 permanent positions, which is already a major benefit for Richmond, a city of 104,000 people with high unemployment.
Time to get prepared
The areas surrounding the Richmond Field Station have few amenities and services, which means there is potential for business creation ranging from restaurants to gyms and dry cleaners.
“We want to capture as much of the indirect jobs as possible,” Lindsay said.
City leaders are already looking at ways to ramp up job training programs to make sure the local workforce is ready when the second campus arrives.
Another area for growth exists in the potential for suppliers of goods and services for the lab, and, of course, the possibility of spin-off companies that could help fill the area’s existing lab and research and development space.
“We need to fully take advantage of what is coming really a few years from now,” Lindsay said. “In the overall scheme of things, when you look at a build-out over 20 years, we have a lot of things to do to get it prepared.”
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
Main campus
Size: 200-acre site in the hills above the University of California, Berkeley.
Annual budget: $836 million.
Employees: 4,200.
Estimated regional economic impact: 5,600 jobs and $700 million.
Founded: 1931.
Second Campus
Total build out: 2 million square feet on 65 to 70 acres.
Location: UC Berkeley’s Richmond Field Station.
Distance from main campus: 8 miles.
Moniker: The second campus will be known as the “bay campus” while main campus in Berkeley will be called the “hill campus.”
First phase: 320,000 square feet for biological science departments; at least 800 employees.
Timeline: First phase to be complete in 2016.
Blanca Torres covers East Bay real estate for the San Francisco Business Times.
New campus will bring researchers, resources together
Premium content from San Francisco Business Times by Ron Leuty, Reporter
Date: Friday, March 30, 2012, 3:00am PDT

Ron Leuty
What do you do when you’re a scientist at the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville who needs the DNA sequence of a microbe that could hold the key to a new source of energy?
Right now, you have to call your colleagues at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek — who have sequencing equipment — set up a time to get together and wait for the results.
And repeat the process again and again. Bottom line: It isn’t very efficient or effective.
But after the first wave of 800 bioscience researchers and support staff move into Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s    second campus, in Richmond, you could get that microbe sequenced by simply walking down the hall.
The biosciences group — broadly, researchers working in energy, environment and health — will be the first to move into the 2 million-square-foot campus in early 2016. The roster of researchers taking the first 320,000 square feet consist of those at LBNL, the Joint BioEnergy Institute, also known as JBEI, and the Joint Genome Institute.
LBNL officials haven’t disclosed how much the initial project will cost.
“Things will get done faster. There will be new collaborations and new ideas,” said Jay Keasling, associate lab director for biosciences at LBNL.
Keasling knows from experience. He has seen scientists at JBEI, a Department of Energy-funded consortium of researchers working in alternative energy, share equipment and ideas by just walking down a hallway.
“When you’re at three locations, when you have to drive between them, you choose to buy the equipment three times,” Keasling said. “We don’t have to buy duplicate equipment. Our dollars will go further. Taxpayers’ dollars will go further.”
Collaboration within the biosciences unit ultimately could lead to more spinout companies — like the chemical manufacturing company Lygos, formed out of LBNL earlier this year — and more technologies.
The hope, said Keasling, a longtime proponent for building an East Bay cleantech corridor, is those companies will firmly plant their roots in Richmond, Oakland, Emeryville and surrounding communities.
But the key to getting to that level of efficiency and effectiveness is in designing the facility with as much flexibility as possible, he said. Flexibility, however, costs more.
“You rarely get this opportunity to design a new campus,” Keasling said. “We must do it carefully.”
LBNL has started the design process. Initial planning meetings have focused on what researchers and support staff want to see in the space and how the design can help their science proceed better. Those requests can range from on-site child care and food facilities to putting certain pieces of equipment in parts of the building most accessible to researchers who need them.
Keasling’s own wish list ranges from an on-site fitness center to equipment that would allow researchers to peer inside individual cells of a plant or microbe and record changes.
The current buildings at LBNL’s campus were built for the nuclear age and high-energy physics, Keasling noted, but have been renovated to meet the specialties inherent in functional genomics.
“If we build this properly, we can renovate it over and over again,” Keasling said.
Ron Leuty covers biotech for the San Francisco Business Times.