Comstock Mining at Lytham Partners: Strategic Expansion in Solar Recycling

On Tuesday, 30 September 2025, Comstock Mining Inc. (NYSE:LODE) presented at the Lytham Partners Fall 2025 Investor Conference, emphasizing its innovative approach to recycling end-of-life solar panels. While the company showcased its proprietary, eco-friendly recycling process and strategic growth plans, challenges such as market competition and facility expansion timelines were also addressed.

Key Takeaways

• Comstock Mining is pioneering a proprietary process to recycle solar panels with zero harmful emissions.
• The company plans to expand its operations with a new facility in Northern Nevada, expected to be cash profitable by Q2 2026.
• Comstock successfully raised $30 million, eliminating all debt and fully funding its new facility.
• The company projects significant market growth, aiming to recycle 33 million panels by 2030.
• Comstock's assets include mineral holdings and a significant stake in a renewable fuels company.

Financial Results

• Revenue Model:

- Tipping fees: $500 per ton for solar panels.

- Resale of recycled materials: $200 per ton.

• Cost Structure:

- Total cost per ton: $150, with $35 in variable costs.

• Free Cash Flow Projection:

- First facility could generate $55 million annually.

- Three facilities could yield $165 million annually.

• Other Assets:

- Dayton Consolidated Mine valued over $200 million.

- 76% stake in Violium Corp. valued at over $500 million.

Operational Updates

• Current Operations:

- Small-scale facility in Northern Nevada running 24/5.

- Processes all types of solar panels, ensuring 100% reuse.

• Expansion Plans:

- Permits for a larger facility expected in November 2025.

- New facility to process 100,000 tons annually by Q2 2026.

- Plans for seven facilities across the U.S., targeting a 30% market share.

Future Outlook

• Market Growth Projections:

- Solar panel waste expected to rise from 3.3 million panels in 2025 to 33 million by 2030.

• Facility Rollout:

- First facility online in 2026, followed by others in 2027 and 2028.

• Strategic Positioning:

- Focus on states with landfill restrictions, like California and Texas.

• Financial Goals:

- Valuation expected to reach billions with full facility operation.

Comstock Mining's strategic initiatives in solar panel recycling position it for significant growth. For more details, refer to the full conference call transcript below.

Full transcript - Lytham Partners Fall 2025 Investor Conference:

Robert Bloom, Managing Partner, Lithium Partners: Thank you all for continuing to join us throughout the day here at the Lithium Partners Fall 2025 Investor Conference. My name is Robert Bloom, Managing Partner at Lithium. Next up, we're joined by Corrado De Gasperis, the Chief Executive Officer at Comstock Inc., who will be delivering a presentation on the company. Comstock Inc. trades under the ticker symbol LODE, L-O-D-E, on the NYSE American. Corrado, thanks so much for joining us. The floor is all yours.

Corrado De Gasperis, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: Robert, thank you. It's an absolute pleasure to be here and I'm looking very much forward to giving an overview of Comstock. A tremendous amount has happened just over the last three months, so we're looking forward to getting everybody up to speed. In that process, I will certainly make forward-looking statements. Please be sure to consider that information in all that you do. Really, the heart and soul, the nucleus of what Comstock has become is a renewable, sustainable metals company. We're very excited about the fact that we're Nevada-based. We're Nevada-based both in our metals and our mining activities. We really developed something here over the last four years that is extraordinary, both in terms of the impact and the size of this solar panel problem, in terms of the incredible economics that it creates and the impact environmentally preventing these materials from going into landfills.

That is our claim to fame. What we do is we take end-of-life solar panels, which were supposed to last 25+ years, and the market is unfortunately experiencing ranges of anywhere from 12, 13 to 17 years representing end of life. Instead of these materials being thrown away and disposed of, we're keeping that environmental hazard out of the landfills. If they go into landfills, they will deteriorate over time. They will break down. They will leachate into the ecosystem. These are not the materials that we want in our neighborhoods and in our community water systems. In addition to that, we take 100% of all of these scarce and valuable commodities. We're talking about 20 grams of silver per panel. We're talking about 6.5 pounds of aluminum per panel, silicon metals, and even rare earths and critical metals like indium, iridium, manganese, gallium, tellurium.

Depending on the panel, there's an extraordinary amount of precious values in there. We're doing it across the entire ecosystem, partnering with the biggest companies in the country and ultimately in the world in these supply chains. The timing is remarkable as well. Because of all that silver that is embedded in these panels, we are sitting on not only a massive addressable market of solar panels. I'll share with you in a little more detail later that there are well over 1 billion solar panels in deployment in the U.S. alone today. That growth of electrification and that growth of the use of silver in all of these types of batteries, solar panels, electrification products has resulted in silver hitting record highs this year in demand. Not only are they hitting record highs, they're projected to continue to grow at an extraordinary cumulative annual growth rate.

That continued outlook of growth has translated into silver demand exceeding silver supply for the first time in just the past four years. It turned four years ago, silver prices went from being in the teens to the 20s to the 30s. People checking their screens will see that we're now in the low 40s. We continue to see that commodity trend continuing forward. Our claim to fame, however, is that we have a remarkable ability to eliminate the contaminants that prevent you from reusing all of these materials. There are plastics, glues, and laminates in these materials that must be eliminated. We have a proprietary process that has four very, very key attributes. Number one, we completely and fully eliminate these contaminants. Number two, we do it with no harmful air emissions whatsoever. Number three, we do it at an extremely low variable cost.

$35 a ton represents less than 7% of our revenue, and we do it fast. The fact that we can do a panel every seven seconds in our industry-scale facility means that we can scale that production line to a level of millions and millions of panels per year from one production line. We were recently, and you see it in the top right-hand corner of this slide, we were recently certified as the only R2 responsible recycler in North America. That means that we take 100% of our materials and we reuse and resell 100% of the materials that come out. That means that zero materials go into a landfill. That means we qualify for the highest form of permitting for a recycler. We have qualified and we have received those permits in the state of Nevada.

We were able to prove out this entire supply chain in a relatively smaller but yet industrial and commercial-scale facility in Northern Nevada that we've now been running for 20 months. That facility is producing clean aluminum, clean glass, and very rich tailings. Rich with what? They're rich with silver. We're getting anywhere from 30 to 40, sometimes 50 ounces per aggregated ton of these materials. Because of that, we're able to sell the collective lot of all these materials. We sell all these materials. Every ton that we repurpose, we sell and are being reused: aluminum, glass, silver-rich tailings for about $250 a ton. The model is that we get paid up front to take the waste. We terminate the environmental liability for our customers. We process those materials, and then we resell them back into the market for a 100% closed-loop recycling process.

The small facility that you see in this bottom lower picture, the white building, is running three shifts, 24 hours a day, five days a week. It wasn't meant to be built to run 24/5 or 24/7. It was built to prove that we could produce all those materials clean, and it has. It was built to see what types of panels we actually could process. We can process every type of panel, and we have thin-film panels, bifacial panels, cylindrical panels, tile panels. The nature, size, configuration, and composition of those panels does not matter to us. We will take them all. This facility that you see right in front of the small facility, Building 1 Industrial Facility, is the facility that we've leased and submitted permits for 10 months ago.

In November of last year, we submitted all the permits to take this small operating facility into what we call an industry-scale facility. We expect those permits by November, and those permits will enable us to process 3.3 million panels a year. That's a panel every seven seconds. That equates to about 100,000 tons of material. Our plan is to get those permits in November. We've already ordered all the equipment. It is scheduled to arrive. Some of it is actually starting to arrive now, but mostly in November and December, commissioning in Q1, fully operating and turning cash profitable in Q2. The profitability is depicted here. We get paid up front, as I said, call that a tipping fee, $500 a ton, to take that environmental problem from the largest utility companies in the country, terminate that liability. Certify that termination is 100%.

They have peace of mind in terms of their liabilities being extinguished. At 100,000 ton operating level, our cost per ton is $150. 35 of that is variable, as I said. The rest is fixed. That's all in. If you're getting $200 a ton to resell those materials, that means you're generating $55 million of free cash flow. The market today is about 3.3, 3.5 million panels of waste coming out. The market in 2030 is going to be 10x that number: 33, 34, 35 million panels. Where are all these panels? This map shows you where every major solar deployment in the United States sits. It doesn't take long to realize most of them are in California. The larger bubbles depict the oldest panels. The larger the bubble, the older the panels. We literally see 50% of the market being California.

If you add Arizona and Nevada to California, you're well above 50% of the market. That's exactly where our customers lie. Not surprisingly, this southwest area of the United States, which is most of the market today, is where we're concentrated. We're planning to put one facility, as you just saw a picture of, in Northern Nevada. The facility is already there. We're just waiting for the permit. We're going to put the second facility in Southern Nevada. That gives us access to all of the close proximities of panels in Northern California, in Southern California, in Arizona. Those two facilities corner, let's say, more than half of the U.S. market. What did surprise us, however, is that we're already getting customers from Texas. We're already getting customers from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida. People absent an alternative solution are sending panels cross-country for us to be recycled and reprocessed.

We're shipping every ton that we produce as soon as we have a truckload that's full. As I mentioned, the market today is about 3.3 million panels and about 100,000 tons. The market in just a little over four years is going to be 33 million panels and a million tons. This is where our differentiation kicks in powerfully. We don't see anybody that can repurpose 100% of the materials. We don't see anybody that has a zero landfill solution. That's important. What's critically important is we don't see anybody that even is attempting to scale to the ability to do millions of panels a year from one production line. When there's 33 million panels coming, we're going to be the only one positioned in all of these jurisdictions to process these panels. Where do we want to position ourselves? Obviously, as we said, Northern Nevada, Southern Nevada.

Texas is the second largest deployer of solar panels in the country. Obviously, not as old as California, but getting there. California has prohibited these panels from going into landfills. Texas just passed a law that went into effect this month that does a very similar thing. The two largest deployers of solar panels have taken the lead to keep these things out of landfills. That's very, very good for us. As you can see, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, New England, even Michigan, these are the epicenters of where you would want to put a facility to be as close as you can be to those panels and minimize the logistics costs. We are paid to take the panels, and they are delivered to us. If the customer has to pay more freight, then it runs a risk of us losing panels to more local operators.

Ultimately, we want to have seven facilities across the entire United States. That is the heart and soul of Comstock. Comstock Metals is the recycling of solar panels, the recycling of electrification products. If we have three facilities operating, if we have our first three facilities on this map operating by 2028, that's the plan. First facility comes online 2026. Second facility comes online early 2027. Third facility comes online 2028. I'll tell you, it's not our plan to only have a third facility coming online 2028, because if we only have three facilities operating in 2029 and the market's a million tons, then we'll only be 29%, 30% market share. That would be very disappointing to us. We're the early market adopter. We're the early customer acquirer. We're the leader. We want to have much, much more than 30% market share.

Even if we had three facilities running at near full capacity and we were only a third of the market or less, we'd still be generating $165 million of free cash flow. That puts our valuation into multiple billions. It's a remarkable economic model, and it's a remarkable growth model, well beyond three or four facilities. Most likely, the third, fourth, and fifth facility will be concurrently permitted and come online as the market demands it. If you look at the rest of Comstock, we still have fully our mineral assets in Nevada. We have a 12 square mile mining district. There's about $12 million of costs on our books. We just updated the mine plan for one of our resources at the Dayton Consolidated Mine. Using $3,000 gold and $33 silver, it's showing an NPV of a seven-year mine life of over $200 million.

I know the gold price has gone up another $600, $650 since then, but it's a remarkable hidden asset on our balance sheet. We also have real estate and investments in real estate in Northern Nevada that have nothing to do with our mining properties or our metal recycling properties. They're real estates that we're looking to monetize at a potentially very high value. We're in a region where Tesla's Gigafactory, where industry, where data centers, where technology companies are pouring in. It's literally one of the top five places in the world for industrial expansion and data center development. Our properties sitting there have gone up in value. We're very keen to monetize those. When we started this recycling business, we were initially planning to do batteries.

We invested in a company called Green Li-ion, which took the recycled black mass from a lithium-ion battery and made it into a cathode-active material. Small investment, $1 million. Today, that investment's worth almost $20 million. We pivoted to solar panels. It's less strategic to us. We love what the company's doing, but we'd like to monetize that investment as well. We've got quite a bit of value here that is unrecognized in our market cap, which is less than $140 million. We have all these assets sitting here. On top of that, we have net operating loss carryforwards that will shield and shelter the first quarter of a billion dollars of profit. I mean, literally over $250 million of net operating loss carryforwards that would shelter the first $250 million of profit. That's a hidden asset on our balance sheet as well.

It should make our cash flow performance even that much more robust. Lastly, we also have a renewable fuels company. It was previously called Comstock Fuels. You may recognize it as Comstock Fuels. In March, Marathon committed to investing directly. Marathon Petroleum, the largest renewable refiner in the United States, committed to investing directly into Violium Corp. That was followed by an Oklahoma-centric investor investing directly in Violium Corp. Even at the lower end of the valuation ranges of those investments, our 76% position is worth over half a billion dollars. If you look at the sum of the parts, excluding the metal business, which is the heart and soul, which is what we're fully driving to become a multi-billion dollar company, we still have almost a billion dollars of other assets and investments that happen to be in markets that are either huge or growing rapidly to be huge.

We're excited about the position. That really culminated in us raising $30 million last month. We were ecstatic that we were able to raise $30 million with at least 30 of the most sophisticated, aligned, and really remarkable institutional investors. The entire offering was institutional. If you looked at our top 40 shareholders in July, you might recognize three institutions in the top 40. Now, today, there's 33 institutions that you would see in our top 40. We really enhanced our shareholder base. Just as importantly, we eliminated all our debt. Just as importantly, we fully funded this metal recycling facility and the timeframe to get from here to turning profitable in Q2 of next year. We're 51 million shares outstanding. We're clean as a whistle as far as the balance sheet is concerned. We do believe that there's tremendous value that's not recognized today.

More importantly, we're going to create tremendous value over the next 3, 6, 12, 24, 36 months with a monster, monster solar panel market. I can't emphasize enough that there's 1.2, 1.3 billion plus panels deployed today in the U.S. That means 30 years, 25 years, you know, of business in front of us. 3.3 million coming out this year, 33 million coming out 2030, 330 million coming out in 2050. The magnitude of this market and no one's ability to process at scale is the opportunity. Very, very excited and very much appreciate everyone's interest in Comstock.

Robert Bloom, Managing Partner, Lithium Partners: All right, Corrado, I'll jump in here. Thank you so much, as always, for your participation here in the conference. Fantastic presentation. Thank you to everyone here watching. If you do have any questions and would like me to sort of help coordinate on some of those or maybe schedule a meeting, I know we're at the end of the conference here today, but happy to get something scheduled outside the event here. Shoot me an email. That's bloomblum@lithumpartners.com. To learn more about Lithium, please visit our website or follow us on LinkedIn to make sure you can stay connected to future events such as this presentation here from Corrado. Thank you again, Corrado. Appreciate your time. Thank you, everyone, joining us, and have a great rest of the conference and a great rest of your day.

Corrado De Gasperis, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: Thanks.

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