Comstock Inc. at Lytham Partners: Strategic Growth in Metals and Fuels

On Thursday, 29 May 2025, Comstock Inc. (NYSE:LODE) presented at the Lytham Partners Spring 2025 Investor Conference, outlining its strategic developments across its three core businesses. The company emphasized its expansion in metal recycling and renewable fuels while highlighting the potential for significant cash flow from its mining assets. However, the company faces challenges in scaling its operations to meet ambitious growth targets.

Key Takeaways

• Comstock Inc. is expanding its solar panel recycling capacity to process over 3 million panels annually.
• The company separated its waste-to-fuel business, Biolium Corp., due to strong external investment interest.
• Biolium Corp. has secured significant funding, including $152 million in tax-free municipal bonds for its first facility.
• Comstock’s mining assets in Nevada have the potential to generate hundreds of millions in cash flow.
• The company is re-engaging with capital markets to attract investors interested in its growth profile.

Business Overview

• Comstock Inc. operates three main divisions: Comstock Metals, Comstock Mining, and Comstock Real Estate.
• Comstock Metals focuses on recycling materials from solar panels, while Comstock Mining holds extensive mineral properties in Nevada.
• The company recently spun off Biolium Corp., which converts biomass into low-carbon fuels, but retains a significant ownership stake.

Comstock Metals: Solar Panel Recycling

• Comstock Metals is expanding its facility to handle over 3,000,000 solar panels per year.
• The recycling process extracts valuable materials like silver, with the potential to produce 3.3 million ounces annually.
• The company earns $700 per ton from recycling, with costs around $150 per ton, yielding an over 80% contribution margin.

Comstock Mining

• Comstock owns 12 square miles in Nevada’s Comstock Lode district, known for silver production.
• With silver and gold prices rising, the company is considering resuming mining operations.
• The mining assets could generate hundreds of millions in cash flow over the next five years.

Biolium Corp.: Waste-to-Fuel

• Biolium Corp. has developed technology to convert lignin into drop-in fuels, a first in the industry.
• Marathon Petroleum has invested in Biolium and contributed facilities for biofuel production.
• Biolium has secured $3 million from Oklahoma and $152 million in tax-free municipal bonds for its first facility.

Future Outlook

• Comstock aims to lead the solar panel recycling industry and expand its mining operations.
• The company estimates its renewable metals and fuels businesses each have a valuation potential of over $1 billion.
• Comstock is re-entering capital markets to attract investors for its 2026 growth profile.

For a more detailed account, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Lytham Partners Spring 2025 Investor Conference:

Robert Blum, Managing Partner, Lithum Partners: All right. Hello, everyone. And thank you for continuing to join us throughout the day here at the Lithum Partners Spring twenty twenty five Investor Conference. Again, my name is Robert Blum, Managing Partner here at Lithum. And today, we’re welcoming Corrado DeGasperis, the Chief Executive Officer at Comstock, who will be taking us through the company’s slide presentation.

For those not familiar, Comstock trades on the NYSE American under the ticker symbol l o d e. Corrado, let’s jump right into it. The floor is all yours.

Corrado DeGasperis, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: Thanks, Robert. Appreciate it very well. It’s a pleasure to be here. I just wanna state that I will be making some forward looking statements. If we could attend to, you know, those guidelines, that would be wonderful.

Overall, as you said, Comstock Inc. Is NYSE listed company. Ticker symbol is l o d e. We actually have three groupings of assets. I would say three businesses, Comstock Metals, Comstock Mining, and Comstock Real Estate.

You know, we basically consolidated, you know, 12 square miles of mineral properties in Northern Nevada and then expanded into a remarkable metal recycling business, which is exploding as we speak in terms of growth. We also have a few investments that are technology based. One in particular is a waste to fuel business, which we call Biolium Corp. So I’m gonna touch on each one of those metals mining and that one business as we go through this presentation. That that fuels business was previously a fully owned subsidiary of our company, but there was so much interest, so much strategic interest, so much investment channeling directly into that subsidiary that we recently separated those businesses, but we remain the substantial largest shareholder, you know, of that company.

So just jumping into it, we are obviously a public company listed on the NYSE. We have a full super competent independent board. But maybe just as importantly, we have fully dedicated management teams. So at corporate, myself, Jud Merrill, Billy McCarthy handle most of what we would call the company wide activities. That certainly includes interface and inter with the investment community, capital markets, you know, and certain other activities that we would say are generic to the enterprise as a whole.

However, each one of our businesses have dedicated leadership and dedicated teams. That fuels business that I mentioned we recently separated. Kevin Chrysler is the CEO, has a deep bench of management, which I’ll share a little bit more with you later. Fortunato runs fully our metal recycling business, and that metal recycling business has the potential to be the largest silver mine, silver producer, for lack of a better word, in The United States. Certainly gonna be the largest in Nevada in the reasonably near future.

And then Judd also, with his extensive mining background, leads our our mining portfolio. So we have dedicated teams for each one of these businesses. For all intents and purposes, we’re a metals and mining company. So I’ll take you through some of how we look at metals, how we look at mining, and what we think about it, in the grand scheme starting with this recycling business. Comstock Metals takes waste solar panels and transfers and translates all of those materials into reusable materials.

Some people are starting to call it urban mining, which we think is kind of a cool designation. And and the common tie of both Comstock Metals and mining businesses is these incredible precious metals that we have either, you know, in the mining district or extracting from these renewable products. Silver, by all stretches of the imagination, has been out of balance between supply and demand. For for most of my last fifteen years, there were there was more silver supply that coming out of the mines than was being, you know, used and demanded. But the growth of industrial use of silver sort of steadily continued to increase until about three years ago when it exploded primarily driven by new electrifications and even within new electrifications by solar panel deployments.

Right now today, there’s over 200,000,000 ounces more demand than supply, and that number is growing rapidly as electrification continues to extrapolate around the world and certainly in The United States. So we absolutely love the profile of silver demand, what it will mean going forward, certainly to the overall pricing dynamic. We literally take solar panels and recycle 100% of the materials, and we resell and reuse all of those materials. This small facility in this picture to the lower right is our three shift fully operating facility, and this big huge building to the front is where we would be expanding into before the end of this year. So we have a a a 7,000 square facility fully operating, you know, fully proven, and now permits have been ex extended to and waiting for final approval, in which case we will move to industry scale.

That industry scale will be 100,000 tons of production capacity per year, which represents well over 3,000,000 panels per year processed. We believe that we’re the only company that can scale to that size, And the reason for that is we have a fully automated, fully integrated industrial process that can do one panel every seven seconds. What’s remarkable is that this market, which is in excess of a hundred thousand tons today, certainly will be a million within about four years. So there is a monster market here. The market is end of life panels going from a hundred to a 50,000 today to a million by 2030 to ’10 million by 2050.

And that’s just from what we know is deployed. How is this happening? These panels are supposed to last twenty five to thirty years. They’re only lasting somewhere between, on average, in our experience, twelve to fifteen, maybe sixteen years. So there is a lot of panels coming out of the market a lot sooner than anybody expected.

So in our facility, we’ve proven that we can take these panels and that we can crush them. We can delaminate and decontaminate them. This is the most proprietary part of our process where we take the laminates, the plastics, the glues, the nasty sticky contaminants that are so difficult to eradicate. We do it efficiently. We do it quickly, and we do it cleanly.

So we have, full air quality control with no contaminating emissions, and we end up with clean aluminum to be used back in the, the the production process, clean glass that can be used back into the production process, and then this mineral rich, finds that are primarily containing silver. I mentioned earlier that industry scale will do 3,300,000 panels a year. At an ounce per panel, that could represent 3,300,000 ounces of silver production. The largest miner in Nevada produces a little over 4,000,000 ounces of silver. So with one facility, we’ll move into the second position with two facilities will by far be the largest producer of silver in the state of Nevada.

So our facility is is fully up and running. Not only do we get paid to take the panels, we take the environmental concern from these utility companies, from these solar panel deployed companies. We process cleanly, and then we sell. We ship and sell 100% of the material. So it’s kind of odd in the sense that our suppliers pay us and our customers pay us.

We get paid on the front end. We get paid on the back end, and those economics are extraordinary. About $500 a ton for material coming in, about $200 a ton for material going out, $700 a ton, if you will, revenue, and only about a hundred and $50 of cost. So that margin, that contribution, we’re not talking about gross margin, we’re talking about the bottom line, is over 80%, and it’s fast. One panel every seven seconds.

So we love what’s happening in this precious metal market. Electrification drives silver demand, but we also have 12 square miles of real estate, which was at one point the largest silver district in The United States, the Comstock Lode, which is our home, which is our brand, which is our legacy. About ten years ago, we stopped mining, and we started redeploying our assets into these new spaces, the recycling technologies, etcetera. It was it was well it was it served us well to pivot, you know, into recycling and into producing these metals from a different source because the junior miners have had it tough for about that period of time. You know?

But but now as as silver prices hit $33 and as gold prices hit $3,300, we’re starting to see the silver miners breaking out. Okay? So we’re very proud that we maintained all of our permits, that we maintained all of our infrastructure, and that we have a a really wonderful high grade series of resources that we can put back into production. We recently hired, a CFO that comes from an extensive mining background, and extraordinarily familiar, you know, with this district and with these assets. And so a second part of our plan certainly will be to advance these assets forward.

The cash flow profile from this one resource alone is in the hundreds of millions of dollars in just over, you know, five years of production. So we we already know what we have, but it seemingly just keeps getting better as these pressure precious metal prices keep in increasing. So that’s Comstock Metals and Mining. As I mentioned at the beginning, just recently, we we separated another one of our businesses because even though we spent the last four and a half years doing with what was called Comstock fuels, the same as what we did with Comstock metals, the external interest from companies like Marathon Petroleum and others was so high and the inquiries to invest directly into the subsidiary were so strong that we agreed because of the capital profile being so significantly different, because the time frame to get into production, you know, being so much longer than metals where we’re already producing and revenue is already expanding rapidly, we decided that it was best served for both of these companies to separate. So what happened was Comstock Fuels essentially became Biolium Corporation.

So Biolium is the brand of these waste to fuel materials that are extremely low carbon and and extremely impactful, in the energy space. We have a fully dedicated team. I am the only member of the team that is in both companies. We have a chief executive officer, a chief technology officer, a chief engineer, and more running this company. And this company’s claim to fame is that when you look at taking waste biomass or any biomass for that matter, the industry standard is the ability to extract about 45 or 50 gasoline gallon equivalents per ton.

If we just took the cellulose from Woody biomass, we would do about 50 gasoline gallon equivalents per ton. But what was missing, what was hidden in plain sight was that the Woody biomass has lignin. And if you can take both the cellulose and the lignin, the entire lignocellulosic components of the biomass, you don’t get 50 gasoline gallon equivalents. You don’t get a hundred gasoline gallon equivalents. We’re currently at a 40 gasoline gallon equivalents, and this is the only company in the world that is proven it can liquefy lignin, stabilize the oil, and turn it into drop in fuels.

As I mentioned, Marathon Petroleum recently invested directly into this company. They also contributed their state of the art cellulosic sugar to biofuel pilot facilities in Madison, Wisconsin. It is now our facility in Madison, Wisconsin where we now have the ability to produce up to two barrels a week of these biolium oils. And what do these oils do? Well, these oils can do anything that petroleum can do and, in fact, can feed right into and blend with petroleum.

They can also provide the oils that are identical and similar to vegetable oils can blend and provide additional feedstocks into these refineries, but they can also take other industries like pulp and paper, which uses cellulose but disposes of the lignin, cane ethanol, which takes the sugar in the cane and disposes of the lignin. And and it can bolt on, it can integrate, and then it can expand those business models to produce more and more fuel. It can diversify corn ethanol facilities, and it can also build and operate standalone facilities. In fact, we have not only the ability to take woody biomass and turn it into the highest yielding fuel equation on the planet, we also have the exclusivity to take purpose grown woody biomass. Company called Hexis a biomass out of Washington state, has granted us the exclusive rights to grow and use these materials in our system.

Why is that important? Because the renewable fuel industry is bottlenecked by feedstock. They don’t have they don’t they don’t have the ability to produce enough feedstock to to literally, fuel their refineries. And if you look at soybeans, soybeans produce about two barrels per acre per year if you’re trying to grow fuel. Corn produces about 10 barrels per acre per year.

Hexis would produce a minimum of 100 barrels per acre per year. And when combined with our technology unleashes, in our opinion, the first biofuel solution that’s actually industry scale and can globalize. So we’re very, very excited about what we have, and we’re building our first facility in Oklahoma. Oklahoma has granted us not only $3,000,000 to pick them as the first state to host our biorefinery, but they’ve also allocated a hundred and 52,000,000 of tax free municipal bonds to support the financing of Biolium’s first facility. And Oklahoma could not be better positioned from an oil and gas state.

They are not only one of the leading infrastructure of oil and gas states with pipelines that interconnect throughout the country, but they’re also the third largest renewable fuel, renewable energy state, you know, in the country. So we love Oklahoma. Oklahoma seems to love us. They’re giving us tremendous support. We’re about to select our first site, and it is almost certain with HEXAS and that sort of biomass, equation behind us that we’ll have many, many sites, in Oklahoma.

So we have built not only an incredible project pipeline in The United States, but we’ve partnered with companies all around the world. We’ve all also licensed our technology to three projects in Australia, project in Vietnam, project in Pakistan, and we’ve built an innovation network from RenFuel’s labs in Sweden to the National Renewable Energy Labs in Colorado to MIT and Wyoming where we’ve literally built the world’s leading lignocellulosic scientific and innovation capacity. We already have the leading solution in the world in terms of yields, cost, and profit performance, but we haven’t stopped there because the innovations that we’re working on include shattering the blend wall for sustainable aviation fuel, reducing the cost to get to parity with petroleum. It’s it’s unlike anything anyone’s ever attempted to or proven is possible in the renewable biofuel arena. So we’re proud of that network.

We’re proud of our partners. They speak very, very highly of the system that we’ve assembled and the technologies that we’ve integrated. And so that’s really Comstock Inc. In a nutshell. We’re gonna be the leading recycler of solar panels in the country.

Ultimately, we don’t see why it wouldn’t be in the world. We have one of the leading mineral districts in the country, certainly, as it pertains to silver. So from a from a metals and mining perspective, we’re Nevada based. And then from a from an investment perspective, know, renewable fuels is one of the largest it’s literally the single largest stand alone asset on our balance sheet. And we believe every one of these businesses, certainly the renewable metals, certainly the renewable fuels, is at least a billion to multiple billions in valuation potential.

And the the mining assets, as I mentioned, have a hundreds of millions of cash flow perspective. Now that we’ve, separated the fuels business, we’re reentering the capital markets and looking to talk to people who are really interested in these resources and really interested in the growth profile, not just revenue growth, not just metal production growth, but cash flow growth 2026 profile from what is now a mature and expanding operation.

Robert Blum, Managing Partner, Lithum Partners: Alright, Corrado. Thank you so much for the presentation here. So many developments taking place here, all sort of rapid fire in many ways. To anyone out there watching, and if you’d like to learn more, connect perhaps with management or or speak with me here, you can give me a send me an email at bloom,blum,@lithiumpartners.com. Again, you can also visit our website or stay linked connected to us through LinkedIn to learn more about the company and and, and and find videos, like this one here.

So, Corrado, thank you so much for your time and participation in today’s conference. Greatly appreciate it.

Corrado DeGasperis, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: Wonderful. Thank you, Robert.

Robert Blum, Managing Partner, Lithum Partners: Wonderful. Alright. Thanks, everyone. Hope you’re having a great conference here, and a great rest of your day.

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