Chevron Still Grappling With Latest Gorgon LNG Outage

Dec 12 (Reuters) - Chevron Corp's Gorgon liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant off western Australia still has one of its two production units shut around two weeks after first being taken offline, the company said on Monday.

The latest in a string of outages to hit the $54 billion project since it started up in March has helped to propel Asian LNG spot prices to levels last reached in mid-2015.

"Production from Gorgon LNG Train 1 remains on hold while we address some recent performance variations," a company spokesman said.

Chevron did not indicate how long the shutdown would last.

Exports from the plant's second production line, Train 2, resumed on Dec. 8 after a temporary halt on Dec. 7, the spokesman said.

Disruption at Gorgon has led to urgent demand for replacement cargoes to fulfil customer commitments, pushing spot LNG prices above long-term oil-indexed contract prices, according to Thomson Reuters analyst Mathilde Jacobsen.

The Asian spot LNG price soared to $8.10 per million British thermal units on Friday.

The last time the Asian spot price exceeded oil-linked LNG contract prices was in winter 2014.

(Reporting by Oleg Vukmanovic in Milan; Editing by David Goodman)