Earnings call transcript: Comstock Mining’s Q2 2025 sees strategic expansion

Comstock Mining Inc. (LODE) reported its Q2 2025 earnings, showcasing significant strides in its solar panel recycling business and strategic financial maneuvers. The company revealed a strong cash position and ambitious expansion plans, though its stock experienced a decline of 7.26% to $2.48 in aftermarket trading. This decline adds to a challenging year, with the stock down 71.27% year-to-date, though still up 61.4% over the past year. According to InvestingPro analysis, the stock appears undervalued at current levels. Key developments include a recent equity offering and a focus on increasing recycling capacity.

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Key Takeaways

• Comstock raised $30 million through an equity offering, bolstering its cash reserves to over $45 million.
• The company is expanding its solar panel recycling capacity from 5,000 tons to 100,000 tons annually.
• Unique zero-landfill recycling technology positions Comstock as a leader in the growing solar panel recycling market.
• Comstock’s stock fell 7.26% in aftermarket trading, closing at $2.48.

Company Performance

Comstock Mining is making significant progress in its transition from traditional mining to solar panel recycling, a market expected to grow substantially over the next few decades. The company is capitalizing on its strategic location in the Southwest U.S., a major hub for solar energy deployment. Comstock’s focus on innovative recycling technology and its plans for rapid expansion underscore its commitment to capturing a significant market share.

Financial Highlights

• Raised $30 million from equity offering, with net proceeds of $27.6 million.
• Current cash reserves exceed $45 million.
• Paid off $8.4 million in promissory notes and $2.2 million in convertible notes.
• Issued 13.3 million new shares, increasing its share count from 35.5 million.

Outlook & Guidance

With a current market capitalization of $111.79 million, Comstock plans to commission its first large-scale recycling facility by Q1 2026 and aims to be operational and profitable by Q2 2026. The company projects potential revenue of $55 to $75 million per 100,000-ton facility. With plans for multiple facilities across the U.S., Comstock is poised to capture a significant portion of the expanding solar panel recycling market, though InvestingPro data indicates a weak overall financial health score of 1.52.

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Executive Commentary

CEO Corrado DeGasperis expressed confidence in Comstock’s market position, stating, "We’re the only ones that can take all that business." He emphasized the company’s competitive edge, noting, "If we have a 30% market share, I’ll personally feel like we dropped the ball." DeGasperis highlighted the company’s preparedness for growth, saying, "Now the foundation is set, the technology is set, the customers are coming in, the revenue is growing, and we’re funded."

Risks and Challenges

• Regulatory hurdles in Nevada could delay facility commissioning.
• The rapid expansion plan may strain operational resources.
• Market competition could intensify as other companies enter the solar recycling sector.
• Economic downturns could impact investment and growth prospects.

Comstock Mining’s Q2 2025 earnings call highlighted its strategic shift towards solar panel recycling, backed by robust financial planning and innovative technology. Despite the stock’s decline, the company’s long-term prospects appear promising as it positions itself as a leader in a burgeoning industry.

Full transcript - Comstock Mining Inc (LODE) Q2 2025:

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc: Good afternoon, and thank you for joining Comstock Inc’s second quarter twenty twenty five earnings call and business update. I’m Zach Spencer, director of external relations. Today is Thursday, 08/14/2025. We are streaming live, and this session is being recorded. A recording will be posted shortly after we adjourn in the investor relations section of our website.

Today, we filed our form 10 q for the quarter ended 06/30/2025 and issued a press release summarizing second quarter results. Both documents are available on our website. As a reminder, Comstock is listed on NYSE American with the ticker LOAD, l o d e. Joining me today is Corrado DeGasperis, Comstock’s executive chairman and chief executive officer, and Judd Merrill, Comstock’s chief financial officer. We received more than 40 questions in advance of the call.

If you have additional questions during the call, please use the Zoom q and a window, and we will address as many as time allows. Today’s discussion will include forward looking statements. Actual results may differ materially due to risks and uncertainties detailed in our SEC filings. Full risk disclosures can be found in our filings on the investor relations page and on the SEC website. With that, it is my pleasure to introduce our executive chairman and chief executive officer Corrado DeGasperis.

Corrado, you may begin.

Corrado DeGasperis, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc: Thanks, Zach, and welcome, Judd and Zach, and all the investors and stakeholders, interested in Comstock for the second quarter results and update. I’m going to use some slides. So for those that can see the webcast, I think it’ll be very effective. For those who are just on a dial in, I I will try to voice over what we’re looking at so that you can get the full gist of of of the update. It’s it’s outstanding, and there’s a heavy heavy emphasis now following the separation of biolium back in May on our metals.

Right? I think in our in our January shareholder letter, we said the real objective of getting through 2025 was in large part a certain transformational transactions that would result in a public Nevada based metals company and an Oklahoma based oil and gas company, both certainly at the highest end of of renewability. And so that’s what we’re getting to. It’s it’s a remarkable thing completing that separation of biolium in May, getting them independently and separately funded by strategic investors. We understand through the financial accounting and reporting process that we will, in the near future, be fully deconsolidating them also from our financials.

We think that’s important so that people can have a clear view of what the Comstock Metals and and the metal operations look like, you know, forward looking and real time as well as what the fuels business looks like. As Zach said, we will make some forward looking statements, but I’d like to take you through a presentation of, you know, some aspects of of corporate and the recent transactions that we just completed as well as a deep dive into the metal recycling business. It’s taken off. It’s moving very, very fast. And the recent transaction that we just completed fully funded us through industry scale operations being up and profitable.

So it was an absolutely remarkable offering that we just completed. It’s fully funded as of today. We ended up pre offering with just over 35 and a half million shares outstanding. We issued 13,300,000.0 shares as part of this offering, bringing in a gross proceed of $30,000,000, net proceed of $27,600,000 on a pro form a basis, and combined with some of the incredible proceeds that came in in May for Biolium, it puts our cash position at over $45,000,000. And maybe most remarkably, as part of this offering, we got our largest debt holder who happens to also be one of our largest equity holders, to agree to exchange and pay down those promissory notes with equity.

Remarkably, they also participated in this equity offering. So a very, very strong testament to one of our largest equity holders, not only being happy to work with us to eliminate the debt, but also coming in with even more equity capital, you know, for that end. That was about 8,400,000.0 in promissory notes. We also had a tail on those convertible notes, $2,200,000. There were provisions in that agreement to redeem those for cash.

We ended up negotiating a slightly lower premium, meaningfully lower cash premium with some additional shares to to extinguish those convertible notes. I could say to you unequivocally, those notes have been fully paid off as of this moment, and we don’t have an interest in any of those interim or bridge capitals activities going forward. So we’ve been trying very, hard to get the businesses ready, to get the businesses commercial, to start growing that revenue so that we could attract more broader, deeper institutional capital. And that’s what we just did. In in all of my thirty years of of doing this, it was one of the most incredible, successful, pervasively well received offerings.

And to say that we’ve markedly expanded, broadened, and deepened what we would say was an already good represented capital base. You know, what we had was necessary. What we had was not sufficient. We now have a foundation that is not rock. I would say it’s it’s titanium.

Most importantly most importantly, we funded such that we have a clear line of sight to Metals bringing their first facility online. We have a clear line of sight of that facility turning profitable, and we have a clear line of sight of not needing more equity to go to facility two and beyond. Right? We’re gonna give you a deep dive on the metals business, and I’m reasonably certain, you’re going to like a lot of what’s happening and what Fortunato has created. Before I do that, I wanna say that, you know, the the the bankers who we’ve been working with for quite a bit here, ironically, when we first met them, they were telling us we weren’t ready.

We weren’t ready. We weren’t ready. In and around the biolium separation, you know, eyebrows went up and said, it looks like you’re ready. And and they also have an option, a 15% over allotment option, that if they exercise it at their option, would result in 2,000,000 more shares and 4 and a half million more dollars in proceeds. We’ll see how that turns up as we go forward here.

Welcoming Judd, you know, to you know, back into the family as our CFO. You know, he’s he’s already made an impact from day one, you know, settling in. Huge part of that impact is around the financial organization, around the capital needs. Another huge part of that impact is just freeing up a tremendous amount of my capacity. And so that’s extremely welcome.

I think things will move faster with that capacity and with our ability to do these things, certainly with our funding. And then Fortunato, who has been really the nuts, bolts foundation, top bottom of of building this metal recycling business and and some of the incredibly novel and unique technology that we have. And I’m gonna really emphasize that here in this discussion. So Comstock Metals is is our business that is recycling solar panels. Some of you, many of you know that we started in the battery metal recycling arena.

We built a system. We were producing some pretty damn good black mass, but we were struggling with getting to battery grade metals. We were, you know, in other words, struggling to get to saleable metals. We know a lot of people in the industry to this day are still struggling to get to battery grade metals. And we went and looked for a technology that could help us with some of these laminates and plastics and glues, and we found it in Fortunato.

I’m gonna go deeper into that in a minute. But what when we found it, his comment to us was, you know, I don’t think you should be focused on batteries. The the industry has a problem. The industry has multiple problems. One is they’re all chasing the same batteries, and they’re treating these batteries like they’re extremely valuable assets and extremely valuable commodities, and that doesn’t pencil.

If the totally variable cost of these batteries, these feedstocks are so high and if it’s difficult to get your hands on them, it’s not gonna work. It’s not gonna work well. That’s for sure. So he said the entire world seems to be missing this epidemic in end of life solar panels. These panels are coming out of the market so much faster than anybody even imagined that they would be.

And so my first reaction to that was solar panels. That’s you know, doesn’t sound that sexy. What’s so great about solar panels? Well, number one, there’s millions of panels coming out of the market today at least a decade before anybody was expecting to. Millions of panels.

Number two, it’s growing exponentially. It’s gonna be 10 times that number, you know, in four years, and it’s in a major, major environmental problem where the states and the communities and the counties are already mobilizing to prevent these things from going into landfills, and nobody’s addressing this problem. So fast forward to today, that was two and a half years ago, we literally we literally take these these solar panels. We take them from our customers, and they pay us upfront a tipping fee. $500 a ton to do what?

To receive and take from them their environmental liability, their environmental problem that they don’t have a solution for. Nextly, we do not want those solar panels going into landfills. They will contaminate the ecosystem. They will contaminate the water system. Those those materials will leachate into the system and be very, very bad for our communities, plus you’re throwing away valuable commodities.

People seem to be surprised when we tell them that there’s over point six ounces of silver in every solar panel. There’s aluminum. There’s also some critical and rare elements, iridium, manganese, tellurium, depending on the types of panels, germanium. Like, there’s very, very valuable minerals there. So so what we did was we brought in Fortunato’s technology, and we integrated this delamination process into our solution and then expanded it out and built an entire demonstration scale facility.

Now there’s four very, very key things that we believe are novel that our technology does that nobody else can do. The first is that we thermally destroy. At the molecular level, we’re breaking carbon bonds, and we’re thermally destroying these polymers, these laminates, these plastics such that they’re broken down and ultimately reassembling with very, very safe emissions, c o two going up the stack. So we have air quality controls. We have scrubbers, but we do not have any harmful emissions, and we eliminate all the contaminants.

Secondly, we don’t harm the metals. We don’t carbonize. We don’t destroy. We don’t burn the metals in our process. And in in to that point, if if if laminates and plastics are sticking to the silver or sticking to the glass or sticking to the aluminum, they’re not saleable.

In fact, if you do that, you’re just generating new hazardous materials, and the permitting regime that we work under wouldn’t even allow that. So we have a a zero landfill solution because those aluminums, those glass, and those silver tailings come out clean, free of those contaminants. That’s number two. The third thing is it’s ridiculously efficient. Our variable costs are less than 7% of our revenue, Less than 7%.

Most of that is natural gas and the rest is electricity, but in reasonably and relatively small small quantities for what we’re doing. And then the fourth, which I think is the most powerful, is it’s fast. Do a panel every seven seconds. What does that mean? Of course, it means we have incredibly high throughput, low variable cost, high speed process, but it’s more than that because that speed is what enables us to scale.

One production line can do millions and millions and millions of panels per year. 3,300,000 panels per year from one production line. We don’t know anybody that can do that. In fact, we were r two v three certified this year as the only company in North America, which to us means the only company in the world, but the only company in North America that is certified, channel checked, audited as generating no waste and having a a certified proven zero landfill solution. Now one person said to me, well, that’s nice for the environment.

Is it that important? It is absolutely that important for two critical reasons. Most of our customers are sophisticated utility companies who’ve had nightmare experiences with landfills and super funds, and they don’t want that. Number one. It’s one of the biggest boxes that they check.

But number two, every pound that we produce clean, we sell for money. Every pound that wouldn’t be produced clean is not a loss of revenue. It certainly is that. It’s a cost that then is required to be paid to dispose it to the landfill. So how do you have the total lowest cost?

It’s that way. So we proved this. In our demonstration facility in Silver Springs, we proved over a year ago that we can produce clean aluminum, clean glass, and these tailings, these really fine residual materials. That’s all it. That’s all there is.

There’s nothing that comes out. We haven’t set one ounce. We haven’t set one pound of waste to the landfill. Some people said, we don’t understand how you do that. When you’re incinerating in an oven, uh-uh.

Uh-uh. We don’t incinerate. Our process is not an incinerator. Right? It’s much more molecular, much more thermally dynamic, and much cleaner than that.

What was really a surprise is the grades of silver that we’re concentrating in the metal tailings. We we we would have been probably pleased with fifteen, twenty ounces of silver per ton. We’re consistently depending on how fine we screen, we’re consistently getting thirty, forty, sometimes 50 ounces per ton of these residual materials. Now these materials here represent the tailings represent, you know, twelve, thirteen, up to 15% of the weight of the panel that’s coming in. The aluminum represents twelve, thirteen, let’s say, to 15% of the weight of the panel, and the glass heaviest weight by far is about 70%.

So you’re getting almost a 125 per equivalent ton coming in the door in recovery of aluminum. You’re getting another $125 coming in, you know, equivalent ton coming in the door of these silver rich tailings. And let’s say you’re getting $20 a ton for the glass, even rounding it down, you’re at $250 a ton. So you’re getting paid $500 a ton to take this environmental problem off the hands of our customer, and then another $250 a ton to ship the same material, obviously reprocessed, re reseparated, and bagged, you know, out the other side of the plant. I wanna be clear though that we’re selling all the aluminum.

We’re selling all the glass. We’re selling it, frankly, as soon as we’re selling it as soon as we can fill up a truck. The the fines are going to a final refinery, typically, either either in Texas or in Asia. And then their final the refinery is then refining down and now with the metals. Now we’re probably getting paid 60% of the silver value based on those agreements, which is the equivalent to the dollars I just mentioned.

But we do have a notion that we will develop one more step, that refining step. We have refining competency. Fortunato has deep refining competency. We have refining competency from our mining days. We’ll look to do that in the future.

But those silver grades and those silver concentrations come at a remarkably good time. In 2025, silver is hitting all time record levels of demand. Where is that demand coming from? It’s coming from industrial demand, industrial applications, primarily electronics, electrification, and especially from solar panels and photovoltaics. So not only is silver hitting all time record demands, it’s projected over the ten years next ten years to grow dramatically, more and more silver in demand.

And a few years back, finally, the demand for silver exceeded the mine supply. Today, it’s over 200,000,000 ounces a year that’s being consumed more than is being produced, which is what brought the silver prices from the mid to high teens to the high twenties to now high thirties pushing $40 an ounce. That increase in prices over the last year contributed our estimates from going from $200 a ton recovery to almost $250 a ton recovery to now slightly over $250 a ton. For those of you that are familiar with our locality, this is Silver Springs, Nevada on this picture that you’re seeing. And this small facility in the back is where we are operating three shifts processing solar panels as fast as humanly possible.

We we if you if you looked at this picture today, if I took this picture today, this parking lot would be completely full of solar panels. It is absolutely 100% full of solar panels. Hence, in May, we got a massive permit expansion. To the left, you see this flat land here in Silver Springs. This facility is 600 Lake Avenue.

The the land right next to it is 800 Lake Avenue. We secured that land, and we just had it permitted to do what? To store up to 25,000 tons of solar panel material to be able to bring that material in in advance of starting this plan up so that we continue to grow our market share. Now that small facility, you can see it says a 135,000 panels per year. That’s not a small number, but, you know, it’s only about 5,000 ton equivalent per annum.

The large facility can do 3,300,000 panels a year from one production line. 3.3 from one production line. That’s a panel every seven seconds that’s lower than 7%, totally variable cost, and that thing will make money even at 21% utilization. Anything over 20% utilization, it is profitable. And now we have all the storage that we need as we bring in more and more customers.

The market the market today or certainly last year was about 3.3, 3,500,000 panels came to the end of their lives. That’s equivalent to about a 100,000 tons of material and about the size of one of our production lines. But what’s staggering is in four and a half years, that number’s gonna be 33,000,000 panels coming out of the market. And people are like, my god, 33,000,000 panels. That’s massive.

No. It’s not. The US has a billion solar panels deployed. In twenty years, 330,000,000 panels a year will be it’s it’s it’s a massive trajectory. And I don’t think people understand how big this problem, this end of life solar panel issue is.

But some people understand California essentially prohibited classified these materials as universal slash hazardous waste, is what it should be classified as, and essentially prohibits and makes it extremely difficult, if not illegal, to put these things in landfills. So what what did we do? We selected Northern Nevada. If you if you can see the screen, I’m circling location. We selected Northern Nevada, excuse me, right on the main artery of I 80 coming in from Northern California.

Our second site and our our site selector is driving down there today as we speak is on the main artery coming in from Southern California into Nevada. Why is that? This map shows you a dot, a plot if you will, for every major solar deployment in The United States. The bigger the circle, the older the deployment. It it takes every it takes everybody about one second to say, well, California is by far the most solar panels deployed in the country and at the same time, the oldest.

If you add Arizona and Nevada to California in the Southwest Region of The United States, you’re literally sitting on more than half of the entire market for end of life solar panels. Who’s sitting on it? We’re sitting on it because our two first two facilities are putting right in in the immediate proximity of all that market share. That’s what we’re all about. What’s remarkable is the next four and a half years when that 3,300,000 panels of waste becomes 33,000,000 panels of waste per year, more than 50%, that percentage grows between twenty twenty five and two thousand and thirty in the Southwest Region of The United States.

Eventually, the rest of the country will catch up and harmonize. But for now, this is where almost all of it’s at. Texas, this whole region here centered by Texas, you know, going even all the way up to Colorado, New Mexico, is the second most deployed panels in the country to California. They’re not as old. There’s quite a sorry.

There’s quite a few old ones. They’re not as old, but but Texas is number two. But then you have Florida, you have North Carolina, you have Pennsylvania, New England, and Michigan. We know exactly where these panels are. And our business plan, you know, is playing out exactly the way we hoped it would, actually a little better because these are our customers.

These are the customers we’ve engaged with. These are people we’re taking panels from. What you see in Nevada, California, and Arizona is exactly what we hoped we would see. RWE is our biggest customer. They’re national.

They’re not regional, but their Copper Mountain location has 25,000,000 panels deployed all by themselves. Their replacement rate over the next eight, nine, ten years is gonna be easily a million panels a year. It could be 2,000,000 panels a year, probably gonna be higher than 2,000,000 at some point in the continuum. What we didn’t expect is that we would have Florida Light and Power and NextEra, sorry, and NextEra as as top three customer. We didn’t expect people sending panels to Nevada from Florida, from Pennsylvania, from Ohio, from from Louisiana and Texas.

That reaffirms to us that they don’t really have a good alternative. They don’t have a good alternative. We don’t see any alternative that can scale. So so when we look at our our quote, unquote competitors, they have little foreign mechanical systems. Can they do five or 6,000 tons a year?

Yeah. A system probably could do that. Can they scale that bigger? No. They they would need 20 of those to match our automated, you know, fully automated continuously operating system.

20 of those would be two and a half times our CapEx, which is a lot, but it’s not even as big a problem as 25 times the opex. If they need four or five people to run one of those small systems, we only need three people to run our fully automated large system. We don’t have to multiply that number of people times 20 systems. So the economics for us are formidable. We’re sitting on a market opportunity unlike one economically that I’ve ever seen before, which is we get paid $500 a ton to take in the panel.

We’re getting another 200. You heard me say it’s really closer to $2.50 to sell and ship all that material. That’s 70 to $75,000,000 of revenue if one hundred one hundred thousand ton facility was running full. Even at 85, 90% utilization, right, you’re 65,000,000 of revenue, and you’re making 55,000,000 of profit because our totally variable costs are only 7%. Our totally variable costs are only $35 a ton.

The fixed costs are everything else. Mostly sales, marketing, administration, logistics management, making the system run. It’s such a low number all in. It comes out at about a $150 a ton. So, yeah, we wanna have our first facility up and running immediately.

The plan is that we ordered all the equipment today. This offering that we just closed, all the deposits are going out tomorrow. The permit is due in November. The equipment lands November, December. We’re commissioning in q one.

We’re up and running and profitable in q two. That’s the plan. But the minute the Nevada Department of Environmental Protection hands us the permit for the North, we’re gonna hand them right back the identical permit application for the South. Same state, same department, same bureau chief, same permit writer. Because we wanna corner half of The US market immediately.

You could you could simply say, okay. Facility up and running early twenty six, facility up and running early twenty seven, facility up and running early twenty eight. Where’s that third facility gonna go? Well, we’ll see. Will it be Florida?

Will it be Texas? Will it be North Carolina? It’ll it’ll be one of those. Okay. We have three facilities.

Now 2930, you’re looking at a million tons of weights coming out of the market. Well, we’ll be we’ll be generating a 150, a 160, a 165,000,000 of cash flow. Well, that’s not correct, Crowder. You have to pay taxes on that number. Right?

No. We have $260,000,000 of net operating loss carry forwards. We will not pay cash taxes on the first quarter of a billion in profits. But I gotta tell everyone on this call, Fortunato and I will have a problem with each other and we’ll have a problem with our team if come 2029, we only have 27, 28, 30% market share. So Facility 1 will go up fast.

Facility 2 will come up right behind it. But 34, and five is gonna go a little quicker if this thing plays out the way we’re seeing it play out now. So let me just pause for one second and say, if you can’t see the screen, I apologize. But what this screen is is the other assets of relevance that Comstock has other than this powerful business plan and this powerful focus that has resulted from the separation of biolium from our portfolio. We still have our mining assets.

People get upset when I don’t mention it. I’m sorry. We have 12 square miles of mineral properties, the Comstock Lode. We have almost a million ounces all category of gold resources. We have almost 5,000,000 ounces all category of silver resources.

The date in mine is the one where we have an engineered internal mine plan that shows 400 of free cash flow. And now as you see on the screen, a net present value assuming $3,000 gold of over 200,000,000. We’re working very hard to monetize those assets. What does that mean, Krauta? Are you selling them?

What does it mean? It means any way that we can monetize those assets. For the first time in literally ten years, people are taking an interest in in smaller scale but very profitable precious metal assets. So we’re happy about that. We also are selling the real estate.

I know everyone’s heard it for a very long time, and I know we have some questions about it. But let me tell you what happened. Northern Nevada got overwhelmed with industrial businesses, starting with Tesla’s Gigafactory, then Redwood, then everybody else and their mother seemed to come in. And then the second wave, though, was the data centers from Switch to Google to Microsoft. And I could name five more without even blinking.

And and what they did is they really slowed down the public utility’s ability to deliver power fast. And that, frankly, slowed down, you know, the interest from the data centers. It didn’t go away. It’s as strong as it’s ever been. But but, you know, getting the power thing certain now slowed us down.

So I feel badly about that. It was it was a very sad day for me when when that bump hit the road. Now something new has happened. Off grid power suppliers, hyperscale data center developers, and capital are forming coalitions, partnerships, whatever you wanna call them. And they’re coming out now again saying, we now have all the pieces we need.

Forget the public utility. You know, we we’d like to we’d like to do something with these properties. So we’re working that very, very fast and very, very hard. Green Line’s up and running in Oklahoma. They’ve got incredible offtake.

They’ve got incredible feedstock. They’re really running. We hope that in 2026, they’ll do something very major in terms of capital raise. They’re planning something very, very big. We think that at that time, we’ll be able to monetize, you know, at or better.

Know, start up companies are difficult. We see it with metals. We see it with fuels. But these guys really have a grit to them. I gotta say they keep persevering, and and we’re their biggest cheerleaders.

Mention the NOLs. You know, they’re not on our balance sheet at any value. We we’re required to put a valuation allowance and reserve those assets 100%. But if we generate a quarter of a billion dollars of profit, which is right in front of us with this metals business, we’ll be we’ll be not paying cash taxes. And then lastly lastly, the the the biolium separation resulted in us taking a convertible preferred security.

What did we do? We added up every dollar that we invested over the last four and a half years, 65,000,000. We protected it in a convertible preferred security that has liquidation preference over even the series a money that’s coming in. And we have 32 and a half million underlying common shares to preserve our upside. I I know some questions came in on that.

People keep saying, I’m confused as to how I get value from Biolium as a Load shareholder. Well, first of all, Marathon’s investment was at 700,000,000 valuation. That was actually a valuation cap when they came in in March, in February, March. Second investor came in with 20,000,000 cash, you all know that, at a much much higher valuation. But even if you use the cap and you you see that our underlying shares are 76%, then today there’s an asset that could be valued at half a billion.

Market doesn’t recognize it. Market is not giving us any credit for it. So but now they’re funded, and now they’re moving forward faster. Some of the most incredible people in the industry are joining that team. It it’s formidable.

They’re going to be commercializing. The state of Oklahoma is literally bending over backwards joyfully with us together and our strategic investors to to put a platform in place that will create an oil well that never stops producing. That 65,000,000 note will will not show up on our balance sheet in the queue that you’ll read tonight because we’re still consolidating by volume in our financials. But it’s completely the objective to deconsolidate them. And based on our understanding of the accounting rules, and and we’re gonna ask the SEC to to to validate it for us before we do it, we believe before the end of this year, it will be fully deconsolidated, and then people will have clarity to the fuels business and clarity to the metals business.

But we can guide to that clarity today. Obviously, we know what the two pieces look like. So I I I know there’s more I can say, but I also know that a lot of the questions that have already come in will cover it. So, Zach, why don’t we turn over to the questions?

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc: Thank you, Corrado. As I mentioned at the beginning of the call, we received more than 40 questions prior to the call, and I can see we have a number of additional questions coming through Zoom. Corrado and Judd, our first question is, congratulations on the funding. We really want to see the solar recycling maintain its market share lead. Have you already negotiated or ordered the equipment?

Corrado DeGasperis, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc: Oh, yeah. I think I think I just mentioned I meant just mentioned that. So so let me say something. After about four or five months of operating a demo facility, we knew we could produce clean zero landfill, you know, materials. So that was a huge thing.

What we did for the next twelve months was two things. We put every single type of panel we could freaking get our hands on through that thing. I don’t care if it’s, you know, monocrystalline, cylindrical, the thin film, those little tile concoctions. I mean, we put everything through the system, proved it, proved it, proved it, proved it, number one. Number two, Fortunato expanded and built a database of every possible thermal cycle time, every kinetic, every chemistry.

You know? And and with all that data, with all that know how, we finalized design of the larger system. Some someone said to me, it looks like you’re scaling up 87 x. It’s completely not correct. We’re doing 5,000 tons a year now.

We’re gonna go up to a 100,000 tons. A very, very standard, almost by the book scale up, you know, going from lab to pilot to now full demonstration operating. We’re almost on twenty months up to just a 20 x scale up. And and guess what? That scale up is coming with all of the same manufactured equipment from the same manufacturer, And that manufacturer, we negotiated, we enhanced, we modified, we finalized those designs so that we literally were ready today, you know, to to purchase all of that equipment.

Most of it requires, like, a 35 to, you know, almost 50% deposit. And so it’s about $5,000,000 that’ll go right away tomorrow. That’ll keep us on track for landing all this equipment by the end of the year.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc: What are the lead times for the equipment? Should we expect higher CapEx due to tariffs?

Corrado DeGasperis, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc: Oh, that’s a good question. So the lead time is four to six months. Right? And that’s not really a range. That’s, you know, four months for one type of equipment, five months for another type of equipment, little buffer.

So so people can understand how, you know, for us, you know, getting this getting this ordered by now was absolutely critical so that it could coincide coincide and synchronize, you know, with our permits coming in, you know, by the end of this year. All of our equipment is manufactured domestically. We have two major suppliers in California, very close to home. We have one in Oregon, so it’s like, no tariffs. No tariffs.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc: Can you phase in the capital for a facility?

Corrado DeGasperis, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc: So that was a question that, I think probably came up because of something I previously said. We had laid out a scenario where we could phase in, like, you know, instead of instead of 9 to 10,000,000, you know, sort of phase in six and then another three to four. But the way the ultimate crushing and separating system was designed, we we had a I think, I would call it almost like a mini breakthrough, where it just makes more sense to deploy the entire system. So we won’t phase it. It’ll be a 100,000 well, we’re we’re not gonna phase the the first production line in the 100,000 ton system.

Theoretically, we could deploy another 100,000 ton system in that same facility, you know, when the demand calls for it. But the demand is ramping up. Right? The projects are ramping up. The intimacy with the big utility companies is is is forging forward.

And this won’t be linear. It won’t it won’t be, you know, this thing’s gonna improve, you know, 10 or 20%, you know, every quarter until we’re at 10 x. It’s it’s spiky. And when it’s spiky, it means, you know, big orders and big panels. And if you’re not in a position to take them and process them, then you better be in a position to take them and store them.

If you’re not in a position to do either of those things, you’re gonna miss the market. So so deploying this capacity fast is critical. Less likely to phase, you know, a full line will go in, right away.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc: Can you permit and build facilities in parallel? Are the other states easier or harder to permit in?

Corrado DeGasperis, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc: So I mentioned Nevada. I would put Nevada in the harder end of the scale. We did, you know, Nevada somehow became a a recycling hub, not for solar panels, of course. We’re the only ones doing that, but for batteries. You know, you’ve got Redwood.

You’ve got American Battery. You know, you’ve got some other companies that are recycling here. So the regulations every state interprets the federal regulations a little differently. Some of them coordinate with each other. But because Nevada is sophisticated, because of the mining industry’s platform here, they take it very hard and very seriously.

So the good news is we’re through one of the hardest tests. We we understand that Texas is easier. No disparagement or or opinion on that. What we did do, though, is we hired one of the top regulators from the Nevada Department of Environmental Protection who was responsible for, you know, a lot of these regulations, guidelines, and implementations for hazardous waste handling and recycling. She’s already scanning the country for the sites that we’re and the states that we’re interested in, and we’re already preparing for how we might modify our existing permitting regime once we leave Nevada.

Now I think there’s no question we’re gonna get this first one commissioned in q one operating in q two. We’re gonna go we’re gonna try to go faster. There isn’t any reason we shouldn’t go faster for the second facility in Nevada as long as we get that permit filed before the end of this year. That’ll keep us on track to go faster for facility two, get it up and running, let’s say, q one of next year. And then I think then, though, the question is relevant.

Like, what could we do in advance to at least site select two or three sites at the same time, at least start the permitting for two or three sites at the same time, and at least enable storage? Because if you do that, if you have storage, which has much shorter lead time for permitting, and if you have any breakthrough in storage, you know, if there’s a preexisting storage, you know, whatever, then you’ll be taking business right away even before you get the permit. So, you know, the permit for processing. So I think, as I said earlier, if we do one a year for three years and we have a 30% market share, I’ll personally feel like we dropped the ball. If we if we have a look.

I want a 100% market share, but we’ll see what happens. Right? We get fifty, sixty, 70. It’ll be because we went for it all, not because, you know, we were satisfied with less. So when you when you have 55,000,000 of facility, you started thinking about five, six, seven facilities.

And remember, everybody, we’re only talking about The United States. We haven’t talked about anything else. So it’s it’s big.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc: A person is confused by the potential market. Is it millions of solar panels or millions of tons?

Corrado DeGasperis, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc: Oh, so well, ultimately, it’s both. So today or at least in 2024, we saw over 3,000,000 panels come to end of life, 3,000,000 panels, which is about a 100,000 tons. In 2030, it’s gonna be a million tons in The United States. In 2050, we’re projecting 8,000,000 tons. So it’s millions of panels today.

It’ll be tens and then hundreds of millions of panels in the future. It’s hundreds of thousands of tons today. It’ll be millions of tons in the future. Good question, though. Good clarification.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc: And metal success seems to rely on long term contracts. MSAs are good, but do you expect stronger, longer guaranteed contract?

Corrado DeGasperis, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc: I think I think I think this is a really this is a really, this is this question is really profound in the sense of what the market is. So let me let me let me reverbalize. There’s three things that give us competitive advantage. One, zero landfill solution. Okay.

We don’t have one operating competitor that represents that there’s zero landfill. I mean, the best we’ve heard is we can do up to 90% recovery. I mean, someone might have said 95. I can’t remember. But zero landfill, number one.

Number two, you have the capacity to handle millions and millions of panels. The only people that have the capacity to handle millions and millions of panel are us and a landfill. The major landfill companies don’t want this stuff. They’re not taking this stuff. California, Texas, no.

So so so where is this stuff going? There’s there’s there’s shady stuff happening. Right? So so we’re dealing our customer base, 85% of the market that we’re projecting are highly sophisticated and responsible utility companies that have HSNEP professionals. You you would be shocked to hear maybe that the top two utility companies in California have directly called our regulators in Nevada, directly reviewed our permits with them.

That that’s what we want. Now now you’ve got scale, you’ve got environmental peace of mind for your customers, you’re literally selling them environmental peace of mind. Because if you can’t zero if you can’t destroy and and and transform those materials into a useful product, that’s a tail on a liability that the customer is stuck to. It’s like a super fun thing. So we sell them peace of mind definitively and we can scale it.

So today, the scaling issue is it’s nascent. Like, you if you get a even a big company that has fifty, sixty, 80,000 panels, we take 80,000 panels in from one customer in q one. You you might have somebody able to take those panels. I’m not sure when and how fast they’re gonna be able to process them, but they could probably get away with taking them. But when you have 500,000 panels, when you have a million panels, what are you gonna do?

So so that’s the second competitive advantage. The third is cost. There’s no one that is as fast and as efficient as we are. 150 all in per ton, absolute lowest cost. However, if you’re sitting right on California, if you’re sitting right on Nevada, if you’re sitting right on Arizona, you win.

Nobody can beat you. Not a chance. In fact, if they’re in Texas or in Florida, it’s gonna add another 150 to $250 a ton for transport. Can’t win. Can’t beat us.

However, if if there’s somebody in Florida, then we need to be in Florida. We need to be in Georgia. We need to be in North Carolina. We need to be in Texas so that we don’t have a disadvantage on logistics cost. Now customers pay for sending it to us today, but, you know, it’s an all in cost for the customer.

If you’re not minimizing it, it it won’t you won’t hold on to it. So I hope I answered that question effectively. I guess the point let me make the point. Is the MSAs fully and totally define the interdependent and operating parameters between us and the customer? In other words, everything is in place for us to take that many panels from them.

We don’t see anybody else having that in place to take that many panels from them. I think once that becomes clearer, once that becomes more obvious, then the the agreements, probably to their benefit, The agreements will become longer term and more secured, and they’re gonna want some kind of economic benefit from giving us all that business. You know? We’re we happy to do that. But today, we know we’re the only ones that can take all that business, and it’s not necessarily even our best interest to lock it up as in terms of the long term contract.

I know it gives people peace of mind, but we we know where the panels are. We know what the economic agreements are. We know what the logistics agreements are, and the business is coming to us.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc: Why are the asset sales taking so long? What is really happening there? Can you provide some better insight?

Corrado DeGasperis, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc: So, I mentioned it briefly. I mentioned it briefly. The the, the Power Grid bottleneck, you know, when when Google and Microsoft and tracked, you know, all came in heavy, you know, and and negotiated the power agreements that they needed to operate their data centers, which did that a long time ago. Everything was kosher. Everybody was happy.

Right? Then then you get powerhouse, and then you get Encore, and then you get I mean, I can go on and on. And Nevada Energy is like, wow. Okay. Six month lead time becomes twelve month lead time becomes eighteen month lead time becomes a two year lead time.

And two year lead time is manageable for large industrial development, but it made a lot of people pause. And what they did was they basically scoured the country for megawatts. Oh, look. There’s 50 megawatts in San Antonio. Let’s go do a data center.

Oh, look. There’s 65 megawatts in Georgia. Let’s go do a data center there. And everybody ran around chasing and finding all these inefficiencies in the market. Now that’s gone.

Now people are pulling tens and hundreds of billions of dollars, like sovereign nations, hundreds of billions. Our federal government, it’s the whole AI compute data center, and it’s not about making money on data. It is about that, of course. It’s it’s also about who’s gonna win this AI race. Everybody and their mother wants to put mega money.

They say, oh, well, we don’t have any power. We don’t care. Let’s let’s get, you know, natural gas turbines. Let’s get geothermal. Let’s get solar.

Let’s get nuclear. So what’s what’s happening now is that these consortiums have aligned themselves to do these things together. And quite frankly, it’s on a bigger scale than I ever even fathomed. So we’re we’re now engaged with four or five of these new paradigm approaches, and I’m I’m I’m much more confident, although no one will give give me any kudos. I don’t I don’t want any credibility on this until we sell them.

Right? I I know we’ve gone through a little bit of roller coaster. We understand the roller coaster. It’s not lack of effort. It’s not incompetence.

It’s the market is dynamic. And so net net, it means higher values to our property, but we we need to get them sold and and move on.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc: Murado, Judd also serves as the president of Comstock Mining. Our next question is, are we going to sell or mine the gold and silver mineral assets? So, look. Judd Judd Judd has an extensive career

Corrado DeGasperis, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc: in precious metal mining. Three three distinct companies, excluding ours, that led to sales to intermediate or major mining companies. That’s an uncommon track record. We’re gonna monetize the assets. I can’t I can’t give any better color than that, but there’s companies that would buy them.

There’s companies that would joint venture and fund them. There’s companies that would buy a percentage in joint venture and fund them. It it there’s a big spectrum. So we’re we’re it’s it’s not as heavy as the real estate discussions that are going on, but it’s it’s absolutely picking up. So I don’t know where it’s gonna land, but what our goal is is a, some money.

Hopefully, it’s meaningful. And b, we unlock the value of this thing for our shareholders. You know? So maybe separating, maybe spending them, but the it’s one of the transformational transactions that I alluded to in the January shareholder letter. But I’m gonna tell you right now for the first five or six months of the year, all we got was inquiries that that sort of played out as being not credible or not meaningful.

And now we’re getting some meaningful and credible inquiries. Again, without Judd, I’m not sure how how well we would have been able to prioritize those things. Now they can be fully prioritized. Corrado, as a shareholder, this person is not clear what they get from a future BIOLIUM IPO. They get shares equal to doubled shares.

Again, apologies for me that to the extent we caused any confusion initially, you know, using terms like spin out and and maybe examples of what was possible, we might have set the wrong expectation. So there was no real way to efficiently do a share for share spin out. K? So that that got taken off the table very quickly. There’s no way to do it in a tax free manner, you know, for our shareholders.

More importantly, Byolium is not generating revenue or profit yet. So, you know, taking that company public in the near term would have been an absolute disaster in my opinion. So what we did do was we protected the investment with the preferred, and we have, you know, 76% today of the underlying common, 32 and a half million shares. The way that our agreement is written is that we can’t convert to common shares until there’s an IPO. If there’s an IPO and we hold on to the investment, we’re we’re limited in the amount of common shares that we could convert Unless, we wanted to distribute it to our shareholders, in which case we could distribute it all to our shareholders.

I have no idea when it’s gonna go public, what the value is gonna be when it goes public, and how and and if we would distribute it to shareholders. However, if the company goes public and it’s a multi, multi billion dollar enterprise and we own a lot of it. Okay? If it’s public, if you have a validated public valuation, then the probability and chances of it showing up in our valuation are a hell of a lot higher, more probable than it would be today where we’re seeing almost none of it show up in our valuation. So ensuring that they’re funded, ensuring that they can continue this incredible business plan, which is bigger than anything I’ve ever seen, ensuring that they can get profitable, ensuring that they can get revenue, ensuring that they can then go public will be extraordinarily valuable for our shareholders any way you wanna cut it.

Any way you wanna cut it. K? If for some reason we have a multi billion dollar company that we own more than half of that is not showing up at our share price, then we’ll be forced to do something like distribute it out or whatever. K? But we don’t we’ll we’ll see when we come.

The answer to the question is we’ll be the absolute best fiduciaries based on what we know and and what we see for our shareholders always, which is what we’ve always done. And and and even though we haven’t seen bigger recognition, we are seeing recognition. We are seeing enablement. We are seeing funding go directly into the business. And we’re seeing now world class and I don’t say that with any hesitation.

World class institutional investors, dozens and dozens of them in our stock today. That wasn’t true yesterday. So we now have a formidable high, high, high quality institutional capital base to complement a very, very sophisticated high net worth and retail capital base. It’s the best of all worlds starting now. Now what does that mean?

We we need to execute going forward. I purposely wanted to go through this metals plan the way that I did because it’s all about execution. Get the permit, land the equipment, commission the facility, get more and more bigger customers, build that storage, get the second site, submit the permit, get the third and fourth site, and and then pay attention to the landscape. Where where is the competitor that can do what we can do? They’ll show up eventually.

But if it takes them two or three years, they’re gonna be too late.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc: Thank you, Corrado. Well, it looks like we have come up on, one hour. So that concludes Comstock’s second quarter twenty twenty five earnings call and business update. If we did not get to your question, please send it to IR@ComstockInc.com, and we’ll do our best to respond either directly, or we’ll post the response on x. For anyone who is not following us on x, our main account is at comstock inc.

Please follow us. And, Corrado, did you want to Yeah. Your your closing

Corrado DeGasperis, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc: Yeah. I just want I wanna make, three closing statements. One is, I noticed someone had asked Zach that, you know, there was there was why was this why was a bit of the use of proceeds, like, over a little over a million dollars being used for Northern Comstock? And I’d like to just address that one because as part of these proceeds and and as part of our agreement, we had acquired some very, very, very valuable mineral properties in the central part of the district. We did it through this Northern Comstock entity.

And and what the agreement says is that if we have a liquidity event of over 12 and a half million dollars, we have to accelerate one payment. So we’re accelerating one payment, but here’s the good news. This acceleration results in the completion of the payments for that mineral property. 100% complete, and it also represented almost $820,000 of expenses in our annual p and l that are gone. So no more obligation, no more expenses, you know, going forward from that.

And we own 100% of these mineral properties that have hundreds of thousands of ounces associated with them. So that’s number one. Number two, we concluded prior to this offering fully, extinguishing the obligation associated with the acquisition of the, OrganoSolve technology for fuels with American Science and Technology. That that extinguished, and that had also, like, almost a million dollars a year of lease and rent expense that’s been extinguished. We now own the property 100%.

We pay no more rent. We also completed we haven’t closed on it, but we’ve eliminated the obligation. This was before not using these proceeds for the acquisition of the Haywood Quarry, which is an absolutely critical mining property adjacent or near adjacent to our Dayton operation that enables that mine plan, you know, to get to the finish line. And we extinguished, the obligation associated with the, acquisition of Linneco, which is who owns that Green Lion investment. So we’ve extinguished all of these obligations on balance sheet, off balance sheet.

They’re all gone. And and then we extinguished the convertible note, and then we pay down the the promissory notes. So it would be hard for me to clearly and easily it would be very hard for me to exaggerate the difference. And and and I know there’s some investors who are thinking this in their minds right now. Those sale pressures, you know, using stock to acquire something, using stock in a bridge with a convertible note, using these that’s what was always hurting our valuation.

Now some people are upset, some people sold some shares, You know, I I feel badly about it. You should buy them back tomorrow, honestly. Because now the foundation is set, the technology is set, the customers are coming in, the revenue is growing, and we’re funded. We’re funded. And we’re funded in a way where the these things that we previously had to do, right, we previously saw no other ability to do are gone.

They’re behind us. And I don’t wanna speak for others, but our bankers were like, we don’t even wanna introduce you to these institutional investors unless our diligence proves that you’re done with this. Like, we need to see. We need to come in and see. Are these liabilities gone?

We want you to agree not to incur them again. Blah blah blah. It’s done. So so I really wanna say that that’s huge. Please look out for updates in metals.

It’s gonna be remarkable. Fuels will be giving their own updates, and Oklahoma is is beyond bending over backwards to make us prosper there. It’s partly because of our strategic investor in the series partly because of our relationships there. But my god, you’re gonna hear some great things coming out of Oklahoma from four or five different perspectives. So I know we’re over the time, Zach.

Sorry. But just wanted to get those last few comments in.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc: Okay. Thank you very much, Corrado, and thank you everyone for joining us today. This concludes our webcast. Thank you.

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