Following a search that began in January, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced Monday a list of six finalists for the potential location of the lab's second campus.

The lab's main campus is set in the Berkeley Hills above the UC Berkeley campus, but about 20 percent of its facilities are dispersed across Emeryville, Berkeley and Walnut Creek. The lab seeks to consolidate these facilities, which include the Joint Genome Institute, the Joint BioEnergy Institute and the Life Sciences Lab, in a 2 million-gross-square-foot second campus.

The six sites that made the final cut from a list of more than 20 potential sites in the Bay Area are Alameda Point in the city of Alameda, Berkeley Aquatic Park West in West Berkeley, Brooklyn Basin in Oakland, properties already occupied by the lab in Emeryville and Berkeley, Golden Gate Fields and Richmond Field Station, which is currently owned by the University of California and was the paradigm for a second campus, according to lab officials.

"We had tremendous response to our call for qualifications," said Berkeley Lab Director Paul Alivisatos in a statement. "The large number of visionary responses created by so many communities in the East Bay is an impressive reminder of the value that our region places on science in service of society."

The lab had intended to release the list of finalists in April and the chosen site in June but is behind schedule due to the process of inspections and negotiations. According to the new timeline, a final candidate will likely be announced in November and occupancy will begin mid-2016.