Australian energy company Santos said it welcomed a proposed Chinese acquisition of a share in its business, noting the strong regional interest in gas.

Chinese gas distributor ENN Group announced a proposal to take in 11.7 percent in the shares in Santos held by Hony Capital. ENN is the largest gas distributor in China.

"Santos welcomes the ENN Group onto the register as a shareholder with obvious knowledge of the gas business across the region," the Australian company said in a statement.

The acquisition of the shares in Santos is valued at $750 million. Through a private arrangement, Hony said it would buy a $380 million stake in the Chinese company.

The Australian energy company started producing its first batch of liquefied natural gas from a facility on Curtis Island, Queensland, in September.

Santos leads the $18.5 billion project designed to convert coal seam natural gas to LNG for exports to the global market. The Curtis Island LNG project is fed by a 260-mile underground pipeline from the Bowen and Surat basins in Queensland.

Struggling through a weakened energy market, the company last year said it was taking the "appropriate steps" to cut costs, saying it planned to explore interests expressed in its various assets across Australia.

Chevron signed a non-binding 10-year agreement with ENN for the delivery of about 500,000 metric tons of LNG sourced from the Gorgon project in Australia in January.

The deal is the second for Chevron in the Chinese market since December, when it signed with China Huadian Green Energy for the delivery of up to 1 million metric tons of LNG per year over 10 years, starting in 2020.

Oil giant PetroChina pumps lowest profit since 1999
Shanghai (AFP) March 24, 2016 - Chinese oil giant PetroChina has posted its lowest profit since 1999 with the company citing a struggling global economy and slump in international oil prices last year.

State-owned PetroChina's net profit tumbled 66.7 percent year-on-year to 35.65 billion yuan ($5.50 billion) in 2015, the company said in a statement filed to the Shanghai stock exchange late Wednesday. The profit figure was the weakest since 1999, according to Bloomberg News.

Annual revenue dropped 24.4 percent on the year to 1.73 trillion yuan, the statement said, as benchmark crude oil prices slumped by nearly half.

"In 2015, the global economic recovery slowed down, the downward pressure on China's economy continuously intensified, the overall supply in the oil and gas market was sufficient and the international oil prices kept dropping," the statement said.

China's economy, the world's second largest, grew an annual 6.9 percent last year -- the lowest in a quarter of a century -- which dragged on the global recovery.

PetroChina's Shanghai-listed stock was down 1.41 percent on Thursday afternoon.

The company plans to shut down oil and gas fields that have no hope of making profits, PetroChina chairman Wang Yilin said in Hong Kong on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg, marking its first output cut in 17 years.

In 2015, PetroChina's crude oil output -- both domestic and overseas -- reached 971.9 million barrels, up 2.8 percent from 2014, according to the company.

PetroChina's parent China National Petroleum Corp. is among the government-owned enterprises Beijing is calling on to become more market-oriented to help reform the lumbering state sector.

As part of the reform drive, PetroChina sold half of a pipeline unit for $2.4 billion to spin off non-core assets. It also announced plans to integrate assets in three pipeline subsidiaries into a single company to reduce operating costs.