BG Group is to sell up to 20 per cent of a large Australian liquefied natural gas project, according to people familiar with the matter, in a deal that could be worth $2bn.

The company is selling a stake in the $15bn Queensland Curtis LNG project, one of BG’s largest investments. The plant, which is scheduled to start exporting gas in 2014, will be the first in the world to produce LNG from coal-bed methane, a type of natural gas found in depleted coal seams.

Australia has some of the world’s largest reserves of coal-bed methane, and the industry has attracted sizeable investments by international oil groups such as Royal Dutch Shell, ConocoPhillipsand PetroChina, which were drawn by Australia’s proximity to the fast-growing energy markets of Asia.

BG has big oil and gas projects in Brazil and Australia, but analysts say it lacks the financial capacity to develop them all on its own. There have long been expectations that it would sell down its stake in the Queensland development, which at 93.75 per cent is unusually large for a project of this kind.

Offering a stake for sale is “an exercise in risk management,” said one person familiar with the matter, since the technology of cooling coal-bed methane for export is still untried. He said the sale was a “very compressed process,” with BG hoping that bidders will make their initial offers before the end of March.

BG declined to comment.

Chinese national oil companies, state-backed Middle Eastern groups and Japanese trading houses and utilities are likely to feature among the bidders. Japanese demand for LNG as an alternative to nuclear power has grown sincelast year’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, and Tokyo Gas already has small equity interests in BG’s Australian gas fields and planned LNG processing facilities, as does China’s Cnooc.

BG entered Australia in 2008 through an alliance with Queensland Gas Company, which it acquired outright the following year. BG owns interests in concessions there covering about 33,000 square kilometres, and says that only a fraction of the total ground under lease has been explored.

The Queensland project envisages natural gas being piped to a planned LNG terminal on Curtis Island, near the city of Gladstone on Australia’s east coast. The first phase will see the construction of two trains or processing units with production capacity of 8.5m tonnes per year. BG is investigating the potential for a third train. The company has already marketed 10m tonnes of LNG from the project, with buyers including Chubu Electric, Tokyo Gas and Cnooc.