Comstock Inc. ($LODE)

Hello, and thank you for joining us for the iAccess Alpha Virtual Best Ideas Spring Investment Conference 2026. IAccess Alpha hosts virtual investor conferences featuring small and micro-cap companies sourced directly from investors and industry professionals. Today, you will hear presentations from a curated group of selected companies. IAccess Alpha holds 4 virtual best ideas investor conferences annually, 1 per quarter. Our next event will be the iAccess Alpha Virtual Best Ideas summer investment conference scheduled for June 23 to 24, 2026. We would also like to thank the many investors who contribute ideas and help source companies. These conferences would not be as valuable or high quality without your ongoing support. Now let's begin with our first presenting company, Comstock Inc. [Operator Instructions] I'd now like to turn the floor over to today's host, Corrado De Gasperis, CEO of Comstock Inc. Please go ahead.

Thank you, [ MacKenzie ], and welcome, everyone, to Comstock Inc. corporate overview. Comstock Inc. is located in Virginia City, Nevada and our trading symbol on the New York Stock Exchange is LODE. There will most certainly be some forward-looking statements. Please take cautionary notice regarding your use of information from those forward-looking statements. Just want to kick it off by saying that we have really been ramping up remarkably the solar panel recycling business. The heart of this update will be there. I will also touch on Bioleum and Sierra Springs at the end as we wrap it up before taking questions. I'm on the call with Judd Merrill, our Chief Financial Officer, also President of Comstock Mining. Our team is really dedicated series of teams, one dedicated to mining, one dedicated to metals and one dedicated to the Bioleum fuels business. But we've been spending substantially all of our time capacity and energies on accelerating the metals business. The company's outstanding shares is 74.1 million. I'll give you a quick reconciliation of that here in just a second. We have a strong funded position for our businesses, primarily almost singularly around Comstock Metals and the offering that was completed at the end of January has really well positioned us not only to fully fund, we fully funded and paid for facility #1 of the metal recycling business. That facility is being assembled, being commissioned, being readied as we speak. But we also raised additional funds targeting facility #2 and starting the site selection for 3, 4 and 5 and the permitting there too. I'll give you quick updates on that as well. Our bankers did exercise overallotment option. Within 30 days of that last offering so that resulted in additional 2,000,727 shares as well as an additional $7.5 million into our treasury. That offering that we did back in August really was the impetus of eliminating and extinguishing substantially all of our obligations. Certainly the promissory notes and the convertible notes extinguished, but there were also other liabilities that were either on the balance sheet or contingent eliminated. So we haven't had a position like this for a long time meaning fully funded, strong balance sheet, no debt obligations and that was depicted in our third quarter filing footnote, as you can see on the slide, but it also looks exactly the same in our year-end footnote. So getting back to the discussion of metals, 2025 was a remarkable year. We completed and received all of our permits for our industry scale facility in Silver Springs. This is a first of its kind industry scale facility. You'll see some photos of the assembly that's going on as we speak. But those permits are robust, to position ourselves in Nevada with first of its kind permits literally on the California border for what is effectively more than 50% of the end-of-life solar market puts us in an extraordinary position. Those permits were not only difficult to get, the standard to get them required that the process generated effectively no waste, as we believe we're the only certified 0 landfill, no waste generating solar recycling solution, we think it will be extremely difficult for anyone to achieve that platform here in Nevada and to what add, right, securing agreements with the largest national and regional utility companies in the United States, the largest e-recycling and aggregating companies in the United States that occurred all the way out through 2025 and has positioned us for extraordinary growth even if we don't add customers, which we're adding on a weekly basis. The customers that we have have a remarkable amount of deployed solar panels that will grow remarkably over the next 2, 3, 4, 5 years. We're very, very excited about that. We also raised capital to develop a downstream refining solution. Today, we take away solar panels, we sell aluminum scrap, we sell glass pearls and we sell to refiners silver rich tailings, but ultimately, we want to be refining and recovering those high-purity materials for ourselves. So an incredible 2025, including we had guided to an 8x increase in our revenue billings, we achieved that as well. So really, really a great way to come into 2026. With 2026, let's talk about what we're doing. For us, it's capturing this critical mineral supply chain, here first domestically, then ultimately internationally. The explosive need for these minerals and metals is well understood. I believe it's well documented, I believe but we don't see it abating. The electrification of essentially almost everything that we're doing even before this AI revolution was dramatic, it only gets stronger in terms of the demand and the demand is coming from electrification, photovoltaics, compute, aerospace, almost anything you can imagine is being electrified across the spectrum, and that's resulting in the shortfall in silver, the shortfall is dramatic. The markets are working through it, but you can just see the effect on silver pricing. We do not see the demand for silver abating. And what we do is we take end-of-life solar panels, we ensure that they don't contaminate our landfills, they don't contaminate our ecosystems. We have a 0 landfill solution, meaning not one ounce of these waste get into that environment. And instead, we recover these commodities. The silver is the finest to talk about but there is silver. There is copper, there is silicon metal. There is gallium. tellurium, iridium. It depends on the type of panel, but we can take all panels. And silver alone can represent about 0.5 ounce per panel. If your mindset is in the old school hard rock mining days, I think that 36 panels is 1 ton. 36 panels at 0.5 ounce per panel is 18 ounces per ton of material, extraordinary. But there's a lot more in there as well. And we're partnering with our customers and our clients to properly capture that. Our process is unique, just quick 4 highlighted differentiators. We eliminate all the contaminants. We have not generated an ounce of waste in our process. That means no material waste, no wastewater, no acids, no fluid, no harmful emissions. Number two, we have an extremely low variable cost, less than 7% of our revenue is our variable cost. It's essentially a super-efficient use of electricity and natural gas to power our equipment and power our furnaces. It's fast. So we have designed an industrial facility that's being deployed as we speak. That ultimately will operate with loading one panel every 7 seconds by being able to load one panel every 7 seconds. That means we can do 3.3 million panels per year in 1 production line. That means it's scalable. There's 1.4 billion solar panels deployed in the United States. 50% of those coming to end of life are in California, Arizona, Nevada. Last year, we saw almost 4 million panels come end of life. In 2030, we expect that number to be 33 million to 35 million panels. So the ability to scale is a critical prerequisite to the ability of being able to handle our customers. We got those permits, as I mentioned, and we've already moved to submit the identical second permit for the state of Nevada in the southern part of Nevada near Las Vegas. So we got the permit for Northern Nevada. We're fully permitted. There are no permitting requirements for us to proceed forward. Hence, we're commissioning the facility and we filed a permit for the second operation in Southern Nevada. Identical permit, different address, different location, same process. This is the first address, the small facility is the demo facility that we operated for 2 years now. The key to that facility's success is that we produced clean aluminum, clean glass and clean tailings from every type of panel, heavy industrial panels, thinner retail panels, thin film panels, cylindrical panels. You name it, we've put it through our system with the required and desired results. And we are bringing in panels on a weekly basis. So to date, we have about 6,000 tons of material. That small facility you saw in the earlier photo could only handle probably 5,000 tons running full for a year. The large facility, as I mentioned, 3.3 million panels translates to 100,000 tons of annual materials. This is the front end of the system that's arrived on site. That's being assembled as we speak. It's a much, much bigger, much more robust processing, we feed the panels robotically, autonomously into these systems without manual disassembly, without deconstruction, without delay, quite frankly, a panel every 7 seconds means it's got to be efficient. It's got to be fast. So you can see the magnitude of the equipment required to do that. And as I mentioned, that process has already been validated to produce clean aluminum flake, clean glass pearls and these silver-rich tailings. Now the update that we recently provided was that the -- when we think about selling these materials, aluminum flake represents 10% to 15% of the recovery. Metal tailings represent 10% to 15% of the recovery and the glass pearls, the lowest value by far, but high volume, 70% or more of the recovery. But the stability of those pricings for aluminum and glass is also remarkable. We're selling new materials. We're getting paid for these materials. For the metal tailings, the current arrangement is that we're getting paid based on silver content, and we're getting a percentage of the silver value, but then costs for refining are deducted, then cost for logistics are deducted. And what we had mentioned that is with the silver price just below $40 an ounce, we were looking at about $125 per equivalent ton yield. While silver is not at $40 an ounce. Silver is over $80 an ounce, I mean, last I checked, it might be pushing $90 an ounce. And so that doesn't double the $125 a ton. It triples the $125 a ton to $375 a ton. So we updated our guidance, and we said, look, we're getting $500 a ton for revenue, and we were getting about $250 a ton for these recoveries, but that number now is closer to $500 a ton because the silver value increased by a whole $250 million from $125 million to $375 million as I just mentioned. So instead of generating $60 million per facility with only $12.5 million of capital expenditure we're pushing this thing now to $80 million, $85 million. It's an absolutely remarkable throughput model. It's probably the best throughput model I've ever seen for those who are fans of throughput, extremely low variable cost, extremely fast generation. The speed at which the system generates throughput is what we're talking about. And then when you foundationally understand that the capital was only $12 million, $12.5 million. It's the fastest cash return on investment that we've seen. So we're very excited to accelerate this and keep it going. I mentioned the market 3.5 million, 4 million panels came end of life last year. We're looking at 33 million in 2030, and the number just keeps growing because in the U.S. there's 1.4 billion panels deployed, and we know exactly where they are. 50% of those market is sitting in California, Arizona, Southern Nevada, Northern Nevada. It's exactly why we're putting our first facility in the North, our second facility in the South. So we literally can corner half of the U.S. market and then accelerating through Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, ultimately the Mid-Atlantic rounds out the U.S., we want to have 7 of those facilities. And the success to date has been exceptional. We're getting the customers where you'd expect us to be getting the customers, and we're getting customers from across the whole country, including Ohio, including Pennsylvania, including Florida, and they're not small customers. They're some of the most meaningful customers in the photovoltaic industry including all the big utility companies. So that's why we're accelerating the speed at which we deploy. That's why we're selecting sites in advance including now Northern Nevada, Southern Nevada, looking at Texas, looking at Ohio, looking at all these other jurisdictions. What I'll also tell you is that we are -- I also tell you is that we are talking to some of our largest customers about co-location about putting facilities right on these super mega utility sites which can baseload a facility very, very easily. But the most exciting thing, though, that is happening is that we have designed now and it was prompted by the federal government saying, "Hey, is there anyone out there that can get critical metals and domestic minerals recovered from industrial tailings, mine tailings, process tailings or otherwise." We always had this in our advanced plan once we get our first few facilities up and running, we would then look to finalize the development and design for downstream refining because of the government's outreach, we accelerated that process, finalize the preliminary design, finalize the project to deploy this. And really, what we're talking about here is not selling tailings for a percentage of the silver value. We're talking about recapturing maximum dollar value from the silver from copper, from silicon metal, from -- depending on the panels, gallium, tellurium, et cetera. So we're looking to maximize the value of this entire domestic mineral supply chain. And that would ultimately mean deploying an industrial-scale refinery preferably here in Nevada, preferably in the same excellent location here that we're cornering half of the U.S. market. Potentially by coastal one in the West, one in the East or maybe just one centrally that could be Texas. So we don't know yet where it's going to be deployed, but we do know that we're not going to have a refinery at every recycling facility. You're going to see 7 or 8 recycling facilities across the nation and then you're going to have some central refining capacity, which will be extraordinary in terms of the increase of value, the increase and throughput. So as I mentioned, we updated that recovery because of just the higher silver values, not the potential refining solutions. So this is the model that says we're not refining. We're just selling the tailings. The model that says we're refining is to be determined, but certainly much better. So last thing I would just say is that, and we can go to Q&A is that we are actively looking to monetize our nonmining real estate. We're actively looking to monetize our mining portfolio, right? Our view of the world is that there is real value in these assets. And to the extent that we can monetize those assets for redeployment, take the money out of A and put it in B, B being solar panel and metal recycling, we're keen to do that. In the meantime, we're also advancing the real estate platform that is Sierra Springs opportunity fund. We have had to deploy some capital to that. We have disclosed most of that. We've talked about it. We've engaged in it. it's not a priority for us to deploy capital to that. It's a priority for us to monetize those assets. But in that case, to monetize those assets, we need to deploy a little capital, we need to fortify what we have. We need to ensure there's power capable of going to those sites. And by enabling that, we will monetize a much, much, much bigger number, certainly bigger than what we're deploying here on the schedule. And then lastly, and our expectation, right, our view is that Comstock would be too high growth businesses, the renewable metals and renewable fuels, renewable fuels is Bioleum Corp, which most people know, separated really from the umbrella in May of last year, it's being funded independently by third parties, Marathon Petroleum Corporation investing last year in the first quarter, kicked that off. Another fund investing in May, second quarter, follow that out and the company is currently raising funds in that same vein with third-party fuel-based investors. That's going very well. And we would expect somewhere in the second or third quarter to wrap that up. We're not expecting to allocate any capital to anything other than metals, primarily first, foremost, substantially all and to a lesser extent, Sierra Springs with the sole objective of positioning it for a much bigger monetization. So with that, I will bounce over to the Q&A. And I'll see if I can prioritize these questions, we've got a nice set of about 7 or 8 questions. We've got about 7 minutes, so I'll try to be expedient. Is Bioleum being expedited as compared to the original estimated timing. So I would say to answer that question in 2 ways, Bioleum is moving forward fast and furious. In December of last year, Bioleum acquired a Swedish company called REN Fuel that took in the entire IP portfolio for lignin verification. That means we cannot only take wood to cellulose to ethanol, but we could also take wood to lignin to lignin oils and those lignin oils can blend with vegetable oils in the refining process. So we also acquired Hexas Biomass, which gave us not only incredible access that already existed to waste wood feedstocks, waste wood, woody biomass feedstocks for fuel is the bottleneck in the industry. So the reason we invested in this business has got a huge access to waste wood. Now we have acquired the ability for purpose-grown crops. And what's remarkable is that Hexas delivers the highest yielding by a factor of at least 10 to 50 times compared to other purpose-grown crops like soybeans or corn. So that's moving forward fast. The Madison facility is piloting those lignin oil solutions. We're moving those forward. I would say that if you compared it to metal recycling or renewable metals, Comstock Metals, if you will, Bioleum is probably 1 cycle behind, which is maybe 1.5 years or 2 years behind. If you think that we ran the demo facility in metals for 2 years, Madison facility has been running for 3 or 4 months, right? So it's the same concept, run that demo facility, prove the concept out, prove the final engineering out, get the final investment decision and then build your first industry scale facility.

Someone's asking how we're going to fund our recycling centers. We fully funded facility #1. We fully funded facility #2. We funded site selection and permitting for 3, 4 and 5 and we have also funded the first phase of development for the refining solutions. So I think we're solid with that. Ultimately, once we're up and running, and generating cash, debt financing, very accessible debt financing of multiple types would be available to us to just continue moving that forward. Regarding Sierra Springs, we had advanced some monies to Sierra Springs. You saw that in the disclosure. We advanced some more since then. But the idea is ultimately to convert all of that to extremely high value, significant position such that one it's monetized, we will maximize the monetary value back to the LODE shareholders. I think people will see shortly right around when we're filing our 10-K here what that looks like. There won't be any more questions about structure. There won't be any more advances and we really will see an incredibly valuable asset that we're poised for all the right prerequisite reasons to monetize. That's what we're doing. So let me just keep reading here over a few more minutes. Someone asked what marks the milestone from shifting from pilot activity to a scaled activity. It's a really great question. If you look at the most disciplined technology advances, there is what's called a technology readiness level scale. It's used pervasively in technology industries and certainly by the federal government and the Department of Energy. So technology readiness Level 6 says that you've proven right, with third-party validation that you have something that's technically doable and it's economically feasible. That's TRL6. TRL7 is you have a demonstration-scale facility that actually operates and enables the supply chain. We call that our demonstration facility that we've been operating for 2 years. The milestone is not only does it do what you wanted to do, in our case, ensuring that we can handle any type, size and composition of panels. But then the process, the integration, the engineering is such that scaling it up anywhere between 10 and 20x is safe. So that's the milestone. When it does what you wanted to do and the data enables you to scale it safely knowledgeably, like responsibly 10 to 20x then you're ready to step it up. And that really was our trigger, Fortunato's trigger. So I know everything I need to do to engineer this final solution and scale it up? And then lastly, in terms of market share, our hope in the metals business is that, look, our threshold for profitability is very low. If we get to 20%, 25% utilization we're profitable with facility #1. So for us, that's minimum sufficiency and that's milestone #1. We'd love to exit the year at a higher level, of course, 30,000, 35,000 tons would be wonderful. And then exit next year, 2027, with that first facility running full. The facility is rated for 100,000 tons running full to us would probably be somewhere in the low 90s. We'll have much better intelligence on that after we run it for 2 or 3 months. And we are still coming online in Q2 with that facility. So I think that's my 1-minute warning. And MacKenzie, I'll just pause there. I think I've got 95% of the questions answered.

Okay. Thank you very much. That does conclude Comstock Inc. presentation. You may now disconnect. Please consult the conference agenda for the next presenting company.