Speaking at the company's annual general meeting with analysts on Tuesday night, executive vice president of global upstream and gas, George Kirkland, said the company has enough gas to fill five trains.
"Once again, three trains moving up to four and five trains. We have enough gas...to fill five trains up there," Kirkland told analysts.
The potential expansion could be the reason behind Western Australia Premier Colin Barnett's comment last week that the cost of Gorgon could hit $US32 billion ($A50 billion), making the project the biggest resource project ever undertaken in Australia, though it remains likely that a cost blowout could be due to other factors.
However, Chevron is still waiting for environmental approval for the third LNG train, having originally had regulatory approval for two 5-million-tonne-per-annum trains at the end of 2007.
Chief executive David O'Reilly told analysts he was confident of receiving the tick of approval for the third train.
"We are going to get the permit," he said. "And with the expected opportunity in terms of cost and capacity in yards and contracting capacity out there that is going to be available, we think the timing is good."
"The stars are getting aligned for moving ahead with Gorgon," O'Reilly said.
In February, Chevron Greater Gorgon area manager Colin Beckett said the environmental approval may be secured by mid-year.
The company said it has also made "substantial" progress on Gorgon and Wheatstone - a separate LNG project in the Carnarvon Basin - in the past 12 months, and dismissed concerns that pushing ahead with the two projects at the same time would create problems.
"We believe there's actually some synergy in terms of engineering and that type of thing and construction phasing that might even help with these two projects," O'Reilly said.
Kirkland said the company expects Gorgon to be sanctioned during the second half of 2009 while Wheatstone is advancing toward front-end engineering and design later in the year.
The Greater Gorgon area is one of the largest undeveloped natural gas accumulations in Australia and contains an estimated 40 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas.
The Gorgon partners are Chevron Australia (operator, 50%), Shell (25%) and ExxonMobil (25%).
