Japanese trading companies Mitsubishi Corp and Mitsui & Co are considering buying stakes in Woodside Petroleum's Browse Basin liquefied natural gas project in Western Australia, a newspaper reported.
The heads of the two trading houses expressed interest in getting into the project when they met West Australian Premier Colin Barnett in Tokyo, the Australian Financial Review said.
"Mitsui and Mitsubishi are looking at further investment in natural gas projects and that might include the Browse," Barnett was quoted saying.
"That could be via buying out the stake of one of the current partners, or one of those partners diluting their ownership -- there was some discussion about that," he said.
Woodside owns 50 percent of Browse, which is estimated to hold about 13.3 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of gas. Its partners are BP , Chevron , BHP Billiton and Royal Dutch Shell .
The project, estimated to cost between $30 billion and $50 billion, has been hamstrung by wrangling over whether to build a gas processing plant at James Price Point or processing the gas through the existing North West Shelf LNG facilities.
