China Shenhua Energy shareholders approved a plan by the nation's biggest coal producer to raise as much as $7.2 billion by listing in Shanghai this year.

The proposal to sell as many as 1.8 billion yuan-denominated A shares was agreed upon at a meeting in Hong Kong Friday, the company's president, Ling Wen said. The sale would be the world's biggest by a coal mining company.

Shenhua will use the proceeds to expand its coal mines, power production, railroads and harbors and to fund domestic and overseas acquisitions. The company, listed in Hong Kong since 2005, will sell shares to mainland Chinese investors for the first time.

The coal producer will price the shares at a level that fully reflects "real value," the company's chairman, Chen Biting, said last week. The company cannot promise to market the stock at a low price to attract buyers, he said.

The company may pay a special dividend of 16.8 billion yuan, or $2.2 billion, if the domestic share sale proceeds, Shenhua said Aug. 19. The company has hired China International Capital and China Galaxy Securities to arrange the sale, Chen said.

Shenhua will spend about 27 billion yuan by the end of 2009 to expand coal production, Chen said last week. The company has a target of producing 200 million metric tons of coal a year by the end of the decade and aims to have power output capacity of 20,000 megawatts by then, he said.

First-half profit surged 20 percent to 10.3 billion yuan, Shenhua said Aug. 19, because of increased energy demand in the world's largest consumer of coal. China uses the fuel to produce almost 80 percent of its electricity. The country turned a net importer of coal for the first time in January.

Coal sales at Shenhua, which has reserves second only to Peabody Energy, the world's biggest publicly traded coal producer, climbed 21 percent to 97.8 million metric tons in the first six months, the company said July 16.