PetroChina plans to float A shares at Shanghai bourse at a price affordable to mainland investors, chairman Jiang Jiemin said on Friday.

The A shares will be priced slightly below the company's H shares in Hong Kong to make them "acceptable to everybody", he said on the sidelines of the company's extraordinary general meeting.

But he didn't specify what the final offer price would be.

Jiang had told China Daily earlier that the bullish mainland stock market would not influence PetroChina's A-share plan, and the offer price would be kept within a medium range.

Earlier this week, an exclusive PetroChina source said the A-share offer price would be around 10 yuan each, slightly below its H shares.

Analysts said PetroChina's move to keep the A shares' price close to H shares is a wise one. "Otherwise, investors in Hong Kong may find it hard to accept a lower A-share price," Guotai Jun'an Securities senior energy stock analyst Liu Gu said.

The PetroChina general meeting has approved the A-share plan, and the firm is awaiting a final nod from the country's stock watchdog, a board member said on Friday.

All preparatory work will be completed after the meeting and the shares could be listed once PetroChina gets the green light from the supervision bodies, Reuters quoted Jiang as saying.

A PetroChina statement said it planned to issue up to 4 billion shares in the yuan-denominated Shanghai stock exchange.

PetroChina has discovered major natural gas reserves in places such as Sichuan in Southwest China, Songliao in the northeast, Erdos in the north and Jungar in the northwest, Jiang said.

PetroChina said it would use the proceeds from the Shanghai listing to fund its domestic exploration, building large refineries and pipelines for natural gas, as well as to buy oil from abroad.

(China Daily August 11, 2007)