One Shell Square Miri – A Lighthouse Sustainability Project for Miri

The One Shell Square Miri office building in Miri, Sarawak has just achieved the GBI (Green Building Index) CVA (Construction and Verification Assessment) Gold certification – validating the sustainable design, construction and actual performance of the building during operations. One Shell Square Miri (or OSSM in short), is very likely only the 5^th building in Sarawak to have achieved GBI CVA certification.

Left: OSSM building at Miri Times Square. Right: Final GBI Gold certificate

OSSM is a 13-storey office building with some retail and F&B components at the podium. OSSM was designed and constructed specifically to be Sarawak Shell Bhd’s new headquarters. Shell occupies approximately 80% of the office building. 

OSSM achieved very high scores for the energy efficiency criteria (32 out of 35), indoor environment quality criteria (17 out of 21) and water efficiency criteria (8 out of 10)

Group photo taken during the GBI CVA Site Assessment Audit in November 2025 – attended by representatives from Shell (Tenant), Pantai Bayu Indah (Building Owner), Knight Frank (Facilities Management) and IEN Consultants.

The GBI Gold Certificate adds another feather to this building’s sustainability awards’ cap. OSSM has previously been awarded The Edge Malaysia-PAM Green Excellence Award at The Edge Malaysia Property Excellence Awards 2024 (read more about the award and the building here - https://theedgemalaysia.com/node/734876)

IEN Consultants provided energy efficiency & indoor comfort design solutions, GBI certification consultancy services as well as GBI Commissioning Specialist services for this building. This project has been particularly challenging as well as rewarding to us for a few reasons.

1. The building was originally designed and constructed as a hotel. The building structure was completed before the change to a Grade A and sustainable office building. The building had a low floor-to-floor height by modern office standards. Additionally, the structural beams and columns were designed to match the guest room configurations. This limited options for space cooling and proved a challenge forthe design team to explore the pros and cons of various ways to introduce outdoor air to each space. Eventually, to achieve a decent ceiling height and yet still achieve high airside energy performance, a chilled water system using (Electronically Commutated fan) EC Fan FCUs was adopted. New outdoor air shafts had to be created to bring outdoor air from the roof. Outdoor air is pre-conditioned to ensure good humidity control. Outdoor air supply to each zone’s FCU is balanced and modulated by VAV (Variable Air Volume) boxes based on CO2 concentration readings in the occupied zone.

   Having said that, there was a silver lining to making use of this almost completed building. Being able to keep almost all of the completed structural elements for the office building also meant that this building effectively lowered additional embodied carbon by almost 50%.

Left: OSSM building in March 2022 showing the almost complete structure before the start of redesign. Right: Internal beams and columns designed for a hotel.

2. It's perhaps very common for green building projects to have to juggle between meeting green certification target thresholds against end user’s specifications, especially when the end user is an organization like Shell that has very clear and strict design specifications. On one hand this project adopted a super-efficient smart lighting system for both the common areas (lift lobbies, toilets) and Shell tenanted floors – with the latter being a fully dimmable system that self-adjust using photo and motion sensor. This helps to maintain the target illuminance by dimming when unoccupied or when the space receives sufficient daylight.  On the other hand, Shell’s requirement meant that the minimum illuminance for the tenanted space was around 500lux, thereby exceeding the GBI and MS 1525 recommendation of 300-400lux for working spaces. The compromise was that the lighting system design and operational setpoints was optimized to achieve a very low average lighting power density of 4W/m2 (3x lower than local code recommendations) but achieving end user’s minimum lux requirements.

3. With some buildings, if we’re lucky enough, the energy performance of the building is on target from day one of operations. But in many buildings, OSSM included, this was not the case. For the first 4 months, the energy consumption was about 30% higher than what we had targeted, and also what we needed for GBI Gold. However, for this project, we had the cooperation of not only the owner, but also the M&E consultant, facilities management, AC contractor and BMS contractor to analyse, test out, fine-tune and even upgrade the system to bring down the energy consumption. With everyone’s contribution, we managed to bring down the energy consumption back to the intended target of < 100kWH/m2*year by the 8th month after the building’s initial operations. Based on the most recent 6 months energy data of the building, the annualized BEI (Building Energy Intensity) of OSSM stands at 94kWH/m2*year.

Lessons Learnt

If there was 1 key lesson learnt from the design, fine tuning and performance verification of this building – it would be that if space allows, it is best to separate the centralized ducting for outdoor air delivery for ventilation from the make-up air system for smoke purging. In this building, as well as some other office towers we have been involved in, it is often considered an efficient solution by sharing the same duct. However, our experience from this project is that since the motorised smoke dampers that are only opened when the smoke purging system is activated is almost never air-tight – it becomes very hard to control the unnecessary outdoor air that leaks out from these smoke dampers into the occupied space. This results in excess energy usage as well as difficulty to manage humidity. Hence that would be one recommendation for future projects.