We went looking for the port's battery-storage approval. NSW does not license storing dangerous goods at all

The claim is a good one and it matters locally: the estuary that ships the country's coal becoming the entry point for the batteries that replace it. The port said in July it had become the first port in NSW approved to safely store grid-scale lithium-ion batteries at its Mayfield Multipurpose Terminal, that the approval was granted by the NSW Government in late 2025, and that it followed extensive collaboration with the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure.

Every outlet that covered it, including us, repeated that description from the same media release. A reader who wanted to check it would reasonably go looking for the document. So we did.

Where we looked

The answer, and why the search could never have worked

SafeWork NSW's own guidance sets out the regime in a sentence. If you store, handle or process Schedule 11 hazardous chemicals (dangerous goods) that exceed the quantities specified in the legislation, then you must notify us, it says. Notification means lodging a form, a list for each storage area, a site plan, and an emergency plan with Fire and Rescue NSW. The regulator's stated reason is operational rather than administrative: Notification is crucial to the provision of an effective emergency response by Fire and Rescue NSW.

The thresholds sit in Schedule 11 of the Work Health and Safety Regulation 2025, and the same page notes a vocabulary change worth knowing if you go looking yourself: WHS legislation refer to dangerous goods by the new term 'hazardous chemicals'.

So there is no NSW instrument called an approval to store dangerous goods. Nothing is issued, so nothing appears on a register, so no amount of searching a register was going to produce it. That single fact explains all five results above at once.

What this does and does not mean

It does not mean the port's statement is wrong. A notification is a real regulatory step with real obligations attached, and there are other things the word “approved” could properly describe: an acknowledgement, a departmental position, a planning interpretation, or an internal determination that was never going to be published. The port dealt with the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, on its own account, and we have no reason to doubt that.

What it does mean is that a reader cannot check it, and neither can we. A claim about regulatory status is the kind of thing that ordinarily has a document behind it with a number on it. This one does not appear to, and that is a fact about how NSW regulates rather than a fact about the port.

Our view, labelled as such

Two things are worth saying. The first is about us and every other outlet: a regulatory-status claim was repeated across the trade press for weeks without anyone establishing what instrument it referred to, and the honest position was always the one our original story took, which is that the nature and date of the approval rest on the proponent's word.

The second is about the regime. Grid-scale battery imports through ports are new, growing, and exactly the sort of thing a community near a wharf might want to look up. If the framework governing their storage produces notifications that are not public rather than approvals that are, then the public record will keep failing that reader, and no amount of diligence by a journalist fixes it. That is a reasonable thing to notice as the volumes rise.

Do you know which instrument the approval refers to, or work in this area? Tell us and we will read it and log the outcome on this page.