* Chevron (NYSE:CVX) lines up Australian gas sale for seven years
* Contract makes up 27 pct of Wheatstone domestic gas (Adds Wheatstone details)
MELBOURNE, April 19 (Reuters) - Chevron CVX.N has agreed to sell 20 petajoules a year of gas from its Wheatstone project to Alinta Energy in Western Australia starting in 2020, securing a customer for more than a quarter of the domestic gas output from Wheatstone.
The contract, lined up at a tough time for producers looking to seal long-term deals amid a gas supply glut, is for seven years, Chevron said on Tuesday.
"This agreement is an important step in Chevron's rapidly expanding domestic gas business in Western Australia," Chevron Australia managing director Roy Krzywosinksi said in a statement.
The $29 billion Wheatstone project is due to start producing liquefied natural gas (LNG) for export in 2017 and start supplying the Western Australian domestic market from 2018.
At full tilt, the project will have a capacity of 8.9 million tonnes a year of LNG and 200 terajoules a day of domestic gas, with the gas being marketed separately by each of the project partners.
Chevron has a 64 percent stake, with the remainder owned by Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Co (KUFPEC), Woodside Petroleum WPL.AX and Japan's Kyushu Electric Power Co 9508.T and Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) 9501.T .
Chevron already supplies about 10 percent of the Western Australian market with gas from its share of the competing North West Shelf project.