Nippon Oil signs 1st term LNG deal, more may follow

* Purchase of LNG is for a period of 15 years

* Chevron now needs to sell 1.285 mtpa of its Gorgon gas (Recasts, adds details from Nippon Oil)

PERTH/TOKYO, Jan 7 (Reuters) - Japan's top refiner, Nippon Oil, has signed the first in a what is likely to be a series of long-term LNG deals as it revealed plans to build an LNG terminal in northern Japan.

The deal to buy the 300,000 tonnes a year of the clean burning fuel from Chevron's Gorgon project in Australia is the first long-term LNG deal for Nippon Oil, but the company said it was looking at buying more gas.

"If we found that we can surely sell 600,000 tonnes per annum, then we will sign the long-term contracts immediately," Masami Hayashi, general manager at the gas business department of Nippon Oil, told reporters.

It will ship the fuel to an LNG terminal that it aims to construct in Hachinohe, northern Japan, for around 50 billion yen ($542 million), where it sees potential demand of 600,000 tonnes a year.

The company also said it and Hokkaido Gas were considering building another LNG terminal in Kushiro on the northern island of Hokkaido, a region where it projected demand of 100,000 tonnes a year.

The deal with U.S. oil major Chevron is for 15 years from its A$43 billion ($40 billion) Gorgon project in Australia.

GORGON PROJECT

Chevron now has sales agreements in place for around 6 mtpa of its share of Gorgon LNG and still has about 1.3 mtpa of equity gas that it needs to sell.

Chevron initially owned half the Gorgon project, but its stake has fallen to 47.75 percent after having sold some equity to Osaka Gas Co and Tokyo Gas Co as part of their supply contracts that totalled 2.475 million tonnes of LNG annually over 25 years.

ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell each own 25 percent of the project, and the three companies are marketing their share of gas separately.

Gorgon, which is being built on Barrow Island off Western Australia, will have a production capacity of 15 million tonnes a year, with first gas expected to start in 2014. ($1=1.081 Australian Dollar=92.30 Yen) (Reporting by Fayen Wong in PERTH and Osamu Tsukimori in TOKYO; Editing by Michael Urquhart)