A striking new building complex on the outskirts of Chinchilla, 290 kilometres north west of Brisbane, owes much of its eye-catching appearance to its custom coloured LYSAGHT® CUSTOM ORB® cladding.

The cladding was specially produced to match the corporate colours of QGC (formerly Queensland Gas Corporation) on its new two-storey, $15.5 million operations and production support centre at Chinchilla.

An existing workshop building also received a cladding makeover in the new colours.

As a leading Australian coal seam gas explorer and producer focused on supplying gas to domestic and international markets, QGC is establishing one of Australia’s largest capital infrastructure projects to turn Queensland’s world-class coal seam gas reserves into liquefied natural gas.

Known as the Queensland Curtis LNG project, it involves exploration and development in southern and central Queensland and transporting the gas through a 540km underground pipeline network to Curtis Island, near Gladstone, where it will be liquefied and eventually exported.

The contract for construction of the new Chinchilla building was awarded to Hutchinson Builders, who appointed Toowoomba firm TNT Roofing to fix wall and roof cladding on the new structure as well as to reclad an existing workshop and support building.

The new building has been designed to accommodate more than 120 people in 2800 square metres of floor space.

Chris Collins, Director of TNT Roofing said his company discussed the cladding challenge with Hutchinson Builders for some time.

“Those talks went through changes of design and changes of profile, but the intention was always to use custom colours for the cladding.”

“QGC’s corporate colours are BG Orange and Quartz, so that’s what we had to match,” he said.

“Originally, we worked towards colour matching from printed paper samples, then wet spray samples, co-ordinating our cladding through Lysaght’s Toowoomba branch.

“They, in turn, liaised directly with the BlueScope coating plant in Port Kembla to produce the nearly nine tonnes of coil required for BlueScope Lysaght to roll form the LYSAGHT® CUSTOM ORB cladding and flashings in their Toowoomba facility.”

“More than two thousand lineal metres of custom flashings were required, and all of them were produced by BlueScope Lysaght at Toowoomba to designs we provided.”

“During the cladding work, it wasn’t simply a matter of lapping one full sheet from one colour to the other, we had to align everything with the colour changes on the buildings.”

The roof of the new building covers nearly an acre, and includes expansion joints, step-downs, parapets and a sprung curved section. It was clad in LYSAGHT KLIP-LOK 700® profile in Surfmist®.

For consistency, an existing shed which featured LYSAGHT TRIMDEK® vertical wall cladding had to be re-sheeted.

“We had to design a horizontal cladding solution for that structure, using 0.48mm CUSTOM ORB® sheeting in the same COLORBOND steel® custom colours, which were applied to the new building,” Chris said.

“To achieve that, we used 40mm LYSAGHT® Top Hat purlins fixed in the pans of the original LYSAGHT TRIMDEK® cladding to pick up the underlying existing girts and the CUSTOM ORB® sheeting was then fixed to take advantage of that structural system.”

“There are always project challenges when multiple parties involved, but the communication between ourselves and Lysaght Toowoomba was great. We were always in the loop and that was vital.”

“All up, 325M² of BG Orange and 1390M² of the Quartz was produced,” said Chris.