Comstock Inc. (AMEX:LODE) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Comstock Inc. (AMEX:LODE) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript May 7, 2026

Comstock Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.14, expectations were $-0.18.

Zach Spencer: Good afternoon, and thank you for joining Comstock Inc.’s First Quarter 2026 Results and Business Outlook. I’m Zach Spencer, Treasurer and Corporate Secretary. Today is Thursday, May 7, 2026. 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 March 31, 2026, and issued a press release summarizing quarter end results. Both documents are available on our website. As a reminder, Comstock is listed on NYSE American with the ticker LODE. Joining me today are Corrado De Gasperis, Comstock’s Chief Executive Officer; and Judd Merrill, Comstock’s Chief Financial Officer.

After their prepared remarks, we will take questions. We received more than 25 questions in advance of the call. If you have additional questions during the call, please use the Zoom Q&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 Chief Financial Officer, Judd Merrill. Judd, you may begin.

Judd Merrill: Thanks, Zach, and good afternoon, everyone. I have a few prepared remarks, and then we’ll move on through the slide deck here. The first quarter of 2026 reflects the continuation of the transformation we drove in 2025. But more importantly, it marks the beginning of execution at scale. We are now transitioning from a period of defined by successful balance sheet recapitalization, institutional banking and capital formation, and expanded and enhanced governance into a period focused on operational development, commercialization and monetization. Here are a few comments on the first quarter. As we discussed in our last investor call earlier this year, we completed an oversubscribed equity financing of $57.5 million in gross proceeds and $53 million net of offering expenses.

Our cash balance at the end of the first quarter was just over $53 million, and this is after $14 million that’s already been paid between August 2025 and March 31, 2026, and that’s for our first facility and funds for our future recovery solutions for producing silver and copper and other metals is estimated at $10 million. And our second facility is estimated at $13 million, and that won’t be deployed until our first facility is up and running and scaling and is profitable. Of that first $14 million for the first industry scale facility, which many of you have registered to come and see on May 28 during our AGM, $6.8 million was used in the first quarter and now substantially all the capital expenditures for our first plant have been completed.

We also invested $7.75 million in SSOF, and this was at very attractive valuation. And after we committed to natural gas that can power up to 300 megawatts of power to those and to the other Comstock properties in Silver Springs, and now we’re positioned for a higher value monetization. We also recognized $1.4 million cash gain on the sale of royalty rights associated with the prior sale of our Northern mining claims, reflecting continued progress in monetizing these noncore assets. And separately, we have also now agreed on preliminary terms for selling all of our remaining mining assets, and we’re now in the due diligence process with the expectation of announcing a definitive agreement in the third quarter. Should this transaction happen, it would result in significant simplification, meaningful cash, cleaner and stronger balance sheet, and meaningful upside in annual cost savings.

Q&A Session

We recognized revenue in the quarter from our pilot plant and deferred revenue from solar panel collections. And we expect — and we are now starting to see both revenue and deferred revenue increase as we move forward this year as we bring the commercial plant online and begin showcasing it to customers in June. Total operating expenses increased approximately $1.7 million, driven primarily by higher headcount supporting metals operations, higher facility costs, including our industry scale site at Silver Springs, increased professional, legal and commercialization-related spend as we expect marketing and sales and metals expenses going forward and also associated with various monetization transactions. From a below-the-line perspective, interest expense declined significantly year-over-year, and that’s reflecting the elimination of the legacy debt obligations.

And even as of this week, we’re fully extinguished with no interest expense projected going forward. And then interest income increased meaningfully, driven by our strong cash position. And then derivative-related impacts, while still present, were less significant than in prior year and should be low to 0 going forward with substantially all of our make-whole contingencies now satisfied. Net loss for the quarter was approximately $9.4 million, largely in line with prior year levels, with approximately half of that loss representing the mining and Bioleum segments and the other half representing metals and the corporation. We expect the sale of the mining assets to reduce cash spending by up to $1.5 million annually. And we also expect the resulting simplification to further reduce costs.

Operationally, what matters here most is the quality and the timeliness of the execution underway. The increases that we have seen in operating expense are intentional. They reflect planned build-out of operational capacity, design and deployment of quality systems and industry scale, supporting infrastructure, including operations and sales and logistics. And we’re also investing in the teams and systems required to support multisite growth. And at the same time, the reduction in legacy financing, mining and administrative costs and simplification of our capital structure has begun to show through in our financials. From a liquidity and capital standpoint, we remain in a very strong position. As we previously outlined, we are funded following our recent financings.

We have eliminated substantially all of our legacy obligations and associated costs, and we’ve closed on some smaller sales and agreed to other mining and continued advancing multiple monetization pathways for our noncore assets, which we believe will be significant. And so what does this do? It positioned us to scale and operate our fully paid for first-of-a-kind industry scale facility, expand metal storage and logistic capacity in multiple states, finalize our first metal recovery designs and pilot a 1 ton per day system preferably at our existing location here in Nevada and then secure, permit and advance our second facility in Las Vegas. So looking forward, the financial model begins to change. As we move into 2026, we expect a shift from project-based revenue to throughput-driven revenue.

We expect improving unit economics as feasibility scale. We expect the facility to be profitable at 20% utilization and the corporation as a whole at 50% utilization. So that is our focus. At the same time, we remain highly dedicated on monetizing legacy mining and real estate assets and also advancing the SSOF-related opportunities and then accessing nondilutive capital sources, including grants and industrial financing. So in summary, Q1 was successfully about positioning, deployment and readiness and the rest of 2006 (sic) [ 2026 ] is execution at scale and monetizing our mining and real estate assets. I will now turn it over to Corrado to go deeper into our operational progress and what we are seeing on the ground at metals. Corrado?

Corrado De Gasperis: Thanks, Judd. Yes. No, it’s an outstanding overview. We’re positioning — we position ourselves to monetize these assets just as Judd has outlined. We’re doing it in the mining. We’re doing it in SSOF, and it’s all to support the growth of metals. So let’s go into metals. I know that we spoke, was it 2 or 3 weeks ago with the year-end report. And I have to say that an incredible amount has occurred in the last 3 weeks. So I’ve been actually looking forward to this update. With metals, especially, we’ve now received, deployed, we’re assembling and commissioning the facility. Many of you, as Judd said, will be out on the 28th to see it. Quite a few of you have come out over the last 2 months since January.

And every time someone visits, even if it’s 3 or 4 days in between or a whole week, the plant looks remarkably different. This will be not only the first industry scale, high-speed, high throughput, zero landfill solution, but it will be a showcase for everyone, frankly, but most importantly, our customers — our customers are gaining strong traction. They’re strategic, they’re regional, they’re national. They understand as we engage them what we intend to do, but we will be able to show them as soon as June, and many have already scheduled appointments to visit in June and in July when we will be operating our first industry scale facility in Silver Springs. Of course, our objective, as Judd said, is to turn it profitable, ramping it up to 20% utilization, 50% utilization.

And of course, we want to run it full. We’re also working on upgrading the downstream production line. We — you’ll see the CapEx that so far has been remarkably in line with our plan, but we’ve also stepped downstream to enhance recoveries, specifically for glass and we’re already able to do that today. And as Judd said, by the end of this year, we’d like to have a 1 ton per day fully integrated metal recovery capability. We’re not using the term refining. This is the last time Fortunato said I can use the word refining. We’re recovering these metals to extremely high purities. And we are already recovering glass now to specifications that even 2 months ago, we didn’t know that we could do. And the result of that, I’m going to go into a little deeper now, but it’s resulted in a number of extremely large-scale companies that want to use our glass for things like fiber optics, for things like cement additives, a whole spectrum of uses.

So we’re upgrading the production line. We’re going to be enhancing recoveries. And we’ve shifted from, frankly, worrying about where is all this glass going to find a home. We were worried about it in a professional sense. We were working very diligently on finding it a home. Initially, the values of those homes were pretty low. Today, they’re high, and they’re seeing forces for those materials. So that’s a tremendous update, maybe one of the most salient for this discussion in the last 3 weeks. We’ve also identified our second facility. We’ve already submitted the permits for that facility. We met with our regulators 2 days ago. It’s an extremely positive advance forward. We won’t, as Judd said, procure equipment for our second facility until our first one is up and running and frankly, until it’s up and running and scaling up in terms of the throughput that’s going through that machine.

So we have a nice ability to toggle that amount. You’ve heard from us more often than not that the silver demand and the market for silver is strong. It’s driven by photovoltaics. It’s driven by electronics. But the deficit in the industry, which is reasonably nascent over the last half a decade, it is clearly persisting. China seems to have a bigger implication to that persistence. So the outlook, of course, for silver, which exceeded $80 a share announced sorry, yesterday and is hovering right about $80 an ounce today remains very strong. Insofar as our process, the way to think about our offtake is that aluminum is steady Eddie. We’ve been selling our aluminum cleanly, clean aluminum since day 1. It’s absolutely the lowest maintenance part of our offtake stream.

The tailings, we’ve been selling, most of you know, to a less than optimal refiners. I guess the good news updating there is we had previously been shipping our tailings to Asia. We do now have and we have secured a boutique domestic offtaker. We’re very happy about that because the economics are better and the logistics, of course, are much better. But we always still view that as a temporary condition because we are working feverishly on our own metal recovery process where we hope this year, you’ll hear us prove and demonstrate that we can recover silver from these materials. That will be the first objective for 2026, the announcement that we are recovering our own silver at a 1 ton per day of pilot scale, of course, and then ultimately, that we’re recovering copper, that we’re recovering pure silicon and silica and then ultimately, the [ door ] of these remaining critical minerals.

I couldn’t be more excited about the implications of that. That means that we would then be fully integrated selling all of our materials while still staying in the category of 0 waste domestically and overall. The glass was the one that I had mentioned previously and we have a [indiscernible]. I’m going to show you the equipment associated with that. And let me talk about the capital because we’ve been remarkably on plan here. I think generally speaking, when we were talking in aggregates, we would talk about $12 million to $15 million as the ultimate capital. Judd mentioned $13 million. That’s our real number for facility #2. We spent $11 million on the facility. I’m going to show you some pictures of it coming on — coming together here in just a minute.

That is for all of the equipment to load a panel, crush a panel, condition a panel, sort a panel, bag it, the entire process from literally soup to nuts that allows us those 3 streams. We ultimately spent another $1.1 million in power generating systems — there’s a pretty pervasive understanding that the grids are weak, that the grids are short. We didn’t plan on being supported by the grid, and we have our own strong natural gas feed right into our facility. And quite frankly, the capital for these power generating systems was a hair higher than the upgrades that were originally planned for the facility off the grid, but the cost of the power is actually lower. So we’re very happy about that. There was $2 million that’s been spent. These are money spent that you’re looking at.

There’s $2 million that was spent on leasehold improvements. Comstock Metals spent that money. The landlord is responsible for that money. That money will come back from the landlord. We had a need for speed. And so we got all that done. The building looks incredible. That includes not just building and leasehold improvements to 600 Lake Avenue, but the entirety of the storage complex, which is the number just below it, $1.1 million, and you see the pictures to the side of the fencing and the storage, which is all coming online by the end of this month, many of you again will see all of that. So if you take out the leasehold improvements, we’re just at about $13 million, remarkably right on plan. Like I have to say, the metals team has been exceptional in managing their capital budget and their capital spending.

We are going to spend another $1.5 million, about half of that $1 million has already been spent for this product upgrade. What’s happened, and I’ll show you a picture of it right now, what’s happened — just give me one second here. What’s happened is we have been engaged with some of the largest glass manufacturers in the country. And we were previously talking about using this glass for recycling bottles and tiles and bases. Now we’re talking about fiber optics and cements. And we’re presenting our glass, which is clean of laminates, plastics, glues and those kind of contaminants, but still has some dust on it, still have some small shards of aluminum in it. And so we assembled this Eddie system that you’re looking at that magnetically removes all of the metals.

They’re really just small traces of remaining metals and then cleans off so that our glass meets the highest specifications of the best glass manufacturers in the country, and we’re in final stages of negotiation with multiple parties. I could say, frankly, that all of the parties want all of our glass. And so we find ourselves from a supply and demand position in a very, very good place. In terms of the actual facility, this is an older picture that you’ve seen before with the facility filled, of course, with solar panels. That’s not true anymore. The facility and the leasehold improvements have substantially all been completed. The equipment is being assembled. We took pictures as we were progressing through it just so you can get a sense of how it’s laying out and how it’s coming together.

By the end of this month, it will certainly fully be together and including the power generation and including the external scrubbing systems, everything is on site and being assembled and the storage facility, as you can see, fully fenced and really laid out extremely nicely now. The road — the improvements are being made to the road just alongside it so that we can transport the material super efficiently, super expediently from storage into the processing facility. So a tremendous amount has been done with the core facility with the basic 3 up streams, a tremendous amount has been done with upgrading some of our offtake, especially in certainly the glass. And we’ve also made a tremendous amount of process on our metal recovery from these materials.

We have designed this process. We have finalized the design of this process. We have engaged our major partners, pilot testing, bench testing is being done in a distributed fashion. And as Judd said, we expect it all to come together into an integrated 1 ton per day solution that we would prefer to have right at the 600 Lake facility. And that was what our meeting earlier this week with our regulators was about, and I couldn’t have been happier with the outcome of those discussions. I want to show you the market as well. We’re making continued progress with the market. We’re making progress with strategic customers. We’re engaged with strategic customers, both in terms of customer agreements, master service agreements and even in some cases, co-locating and joint potentially operating agreements.

Those are fascinating. I think this picture that everyone has seen before shows how clearly California, Arizona and Nevada represent the oldest panels, the largest end-of-life market in the country. The next map that you’re about to see was updated. This map that you’re looking at is 2 years old. The map that you’re about to see, California, Nevada, Arizona is presented identically, but you start to see what’s happening in the rest of the country. So just in the last 2 years, the expanded deployments across the southern part of the United States up the Eastern Seaboard and even into the Mid-Atlantic and Northern Midwest have been remarkable. So a part of this is what’s happened in the last 2 years. Quite frankly, part of this is improvement of data, but you can see that this is not a regional play.

The market is big. People always ask me, well, what about new deployments? The solar industry has really hit some headwinds, hasn’t it? My first reaction to that comment is we care less about what’s being deployed today because we’re end of life. Our market is the end of life. But rest assured, look at the projects that are under development. It doesn’t seem or feel like the solar industry has hit a wall. It certainly has some headwinds politically and otherwise, but it’s a relative statement — to imagine that there isn’t wide-scale deployment happening is certainly incorrect. And so we’re stable with our projections. We feel very, very good about what this facility looks like running at 90% utilization. We feel really good about the ability to capture high yields of our silver once it’s really the first step in our recovery process is to start recovering our own silver to be over 90%.

And with these higher silver prices, our metal recoveries start looking just as good, if not better, than our tipping fees. So this is the thesis. This is what we’re working towards. This does not include higher recoveries of our own metals. This only includes the sale of glass, the sale of aluminum and the sale of those tailings. So I want to pivot to Sierra Springs just for a couple of updates. Just as much, if not more, has happened here than even what’s happening with the metals business. I think we can assure people, Judd is fully dedicated to the monetization and sale of all of our mining assets. Those — we’re in a diligence and close mode. That’s a very, very big news. It’s very good news. We cannot share any details until the definitive agreements are done, signed, sealed and delivered.

And as Judd said, we expect that with high probability in the third quarter. The Sierra Springs opportunity, we are deploying capital to Sierra Springs — we allocated the specific capital to Sierra Springs. Their Board and our Board have approved a path to controlling this enterprise. And the reason that we want to control this enterprise is because we were successful in securing power for this land. And I can’t think of a stronger market to be selling or monetizing into. I was going to say I can’t think of a better marketplace to be right now today in the world than critical minerals. But this demand for powered land is — it’s generational. It’s exceptional. And we’re sitting on something that with power comes high value. So it’s not only that we’re sitting in a very widely recognized, highly attractive area for these data centers and these businesses.

And everyone that’s listed here is already here to mention the ones that we’re talking to that want to come. It sits right in immediate proximity of all of the development that is occurring. When we used to say immediate proximity, we were saying 10 minutes up the road to Google, 12 minutes up the road to Switch, 15 minutes up the road to Apple. But that immediate proximity now is right across the street from our properties. So when we committed to essentially up to 300 megawatts of power, we put ourselves in a position with potentially 800, 900 acres of land to be monetizing right alongside what Microsoft, what Tract and what many of these other land power compute enterprises are doing. We do not want to become a land developer. We do not want to be a data land power compute company.

We want to monetize these properties at the highest value. And if there was a marginal increase between powered land and unpowered land, which was probably true 3 years ago when anyone in their mother could submit to the local public utility and get power, it’s not true today. It’s not true today. Today, if the land isn’t powered, there’s very little interest in the land. And if the land is powered, I mean, people are literally kicking your door down and fighting each other to get in. So we have some work to do to perfect and secure the land. That’s why we’re putting capital in. By perfecting and securing the land, what I mean is with the same dollars, we not only get control of the entity, meaning greater than 50%, but we have all of the land, the titles, the water rights and power-secured, debt-free, obligation-free that we can then market to a major counterparty.

When a company like Tract is quoted saying that they’re spending $100 billion in this region in the next 10 years, you only have to come and visit us to see the 1,100-acre development that is underway by Tract on the Peru Shelf. You only have to come visit us to see the 1,500-acre development that’s underway between us and the Peru Shelf. Peru Shelf is only 12 minutes away. So in between us and them is another 6 minutes partway there. This is all happening right up the road, and their third development is right across the street from us. So powered land means everything. In fact, we’ve learned that talking about the land per acre is frankly a misnomer. What these enterprises do is talk about the land per megawatt. You need the land. You need roads.

You need conventional infrastructure. We have that. Preferably, you want flat land. Everything that we’re seeing developing around us is expending extraordinary dollars to flatten mountains, it feels like it seems like it looks like. But our lands are flat. They’re much more valuable in that context. And so — but you need power. Power enables everything, powered land drives the valuation. So we’re not paying per acre. We’re paying per megawatt. How much are you paying per megawatt? A lot, a lot, right? So these valuations are getting very, very interesting to us. So I will say in closing that the metals business will be commissioned. By the end of this month, you will see a fully connected fully assembled plant. By June, it will be operating.

By July, it will be operating continuously. So we’re on track with that. Q2 operations and then ramping up a few months later than we originally hoped, but on track, nonetheless, to be operating in Q2, and it’s a showcase. We are going to be very proud not only to show you how it operates, but we’re even prouder now with the customers that are offtaking all of our materials. So that’s some exciting. We will not trigger the purchase of equipment until we are really satisfied with everything we see on Serial #1 and with the flow of panels that are going through Serial #1. That doesn’t mean we haven’t secured site to. That doesn’t mean it isn’t efficient and intelligent to start the permitting, but you don’t have to pull the trigger on the capital until the market suggests it’s the right thing to do.

We will expect — we very strongly expect to announce the mining transaction in the third quarter, get that wrapped up and completed. As Judd said, we’re going to get cash. We’re going to retain upside. We’re going to reduce cost, and we’re going to simplify the company dramatically. We expect news in the third quarter on Sierra Springs transactionally, that’s not synonymous with it will be sold. We don’t believe that. It will happen that quickly. But we do believe it will be positioned, and we will be engaged with meaningful counterparties to that end. And as I said last time, I do expect from there, it’s 100, 120 days, we should have a lot of clarity on what the monetization strategy looks like. The options since we last spoke are bigger, they’re broader and they’re more probable.

So the work there has been exceptional. For anyone that’s been out since January, and there’s been many of you, including our new directors, which I really appreciate taking the time to literally walk the earth, walk the plants, walk the projects there is a strong level of excitement about what’s happening. What’s our end game? Our end game is to monetize mining assets, monetize Sierra Springs in the most intelligent way and enable our treasury to fund what is really turning out to be more than just a solar panel recycling business. Of course, that’s what it is, but it’s an industrial material business extraordinaire. So let me pause there, I think, Zach, and we can go to questions.

Zach Spencer: Thank you, Corrado. As I mentioned at the beginning of the call, we received more than 25 questions prior to the call. And I can see that we have quite a number of additional questions coming through Zoom. Corrado and Judd, our first question is, what are your future plans for your mineral and mining properties?

Corrado De Gasperis: So I think as we said there, we’re selling them. So I think we were careful with our words previously. We used to say monetize and we thought there could be joint ventures. We thought there could be earn-ins. Those are behind us. We have a clear path to full sale. Now full sale will mean we get cash, and as Judd said, meaningful. We may get some upside with equity. We most certainly will get upside with royalties. So we feel really good about what that value looks like to us. We also feel even better about redeploying that capital into our solar recycling business.

Zach Spencer: Thank you, Corrado. The next question is on Comstock Metals. Your competitors have publicly announced more than 15 grams per panel of silver. Can LODE confirm how much silver they are currently extracting per panel, not the theoretical maximum?

Corrado De Gasperis: Yes. Yes. Our competitors say a lot of things. So I think that it’s very right to say 16, 17, 18 grams per panel. We’re literally consistently seeing that for the majority of panels. Thin film panels, Zach, much less, okay, much less in the thin film panels, much less weight in the thin film panels. We’re also getting, in some cases, wafers of rejected material for manufacturing clients that just have silver and silicon. So it varies. But for the substantial majority, we’re talking about 0.5 ounce per panel, you call it 16, 17, 18 grams per panel. It’s pretty steady Eddie. Now our objective is to recover a very, very high percentage of that number. What does that mean? Like over 90%. So today, we’re generating tailings, silicon, silica, a lot of silver in it.

We’re sending those to a refinery. In the future, we want to be recovering those metals. We don’t want to be getting paid for 45% or 50% of the silver. We want to recover and get paid for 90-plus percent of the silver. When there’s dust escaping or, let’s say, residual on the glass, guess what, there’s silver in that dust. So the upgrading of the glass results in the capturing and recovery of more dust and that means more silver. So we expect to start at a reasonably high recovery and then just continuously improve and continuously capture and continuously improve the recovery of those minerals. So I don’t know, like there’s a lot of variation depending on the types of panels. Once we start operating the machine, we’ll be able to estimate the percentage that we’re capturing, and we’ll be able to focus on, look, the pursuit is to the theoretical maximum.

People might dismiss the theoretical maximum as hog wash. But if you don’t know what the theoretical maximum is, you don’t have anything to strive for. So it will be good to know what we’re actually recovering and then just continuing to strive, you can never reach the theoretical maximum, of course, but we strive for that. So those 2 numbers, what we’re actually recovering versus what we ultimately recover is what we would be reporting once we get into fuller operations. Understanding this is a first-of-a-kind operation, we don’t know the answer yet.

Zach Spencer: Thank you, Corrado. How much of the company’s anticipated solar panel feedstock supply is already secured through long-term customer agreements? And what level of visibility does management have into future volumes?

Corrado De Gasperis: So we spent a lot of time talking about this even when our new directors visited a few weeks ago. It is the #1 least certain item to be clear, okay, the #1 least certain item. But saying it just like that, it isn’t fair because we’re signing master service agreements with large customers. We are working with companies that are very, very serious about how they manage their environmental liabilities. They show us that seriousness by paying us a tipping fee. They also show us that seriousness by wanting to see certificate destructions very, very quickly. And so for us, bringing the system online starts to move major amounts of material. Now let’s talk about that first low threshold that Judd mentioned at 20%.

If you’re talking about operating at 20% capacity, you’re talking about moving 2,000 tons of material per — 2,000 tons of material per month, okay? So we’ve got upwards to 6-plus thousand tons of material sitting there, anxious and excited to start processing once the machine gets up and running. And then we feel very comfortable that the business and the customers that we have would sustain that level. That level is not exciting, okay? It’s kind of like a minimum threshold that we want to sustain first and foremost. It’s neither is it a layup, right? Like we need to continue to work to bring those panels in and then to grow those panels up to much, much higher utilizations. But — so a couple of thousand panels a month, I think, certainly out of the chute for 3 months is just sitting there waiting to be processed.

We would probably do it at that lower rate because as we’re ramping up, we’re debugging, we’re optimizing, we’re tweaking and then we’ll let the market let us grow from there. It’s not — it’s the — how much visibility do we have? We have 3, 4, 5 months’ worth of visibility. But once the machine comes online, once the panels start flowing, that will increase and that will improve as we move forward. I guess the most risk satisfying point is the utilization doesn’t need to be that high. That is not in any way, shape or form meant to suggest we don’t want it to be very high.

Zach Spencer: Corrado, how confident are you that the new equipment will run without any problems?

Corrado De Gasperis: We feel good about all the equipment. Let me say that pigmentically to specifically, each stage of our production from the main crushing systems to the conditioning ovens to the secondary shredding and separating systems. Each one of those is using the same engineers, the same manufacturer, the same supplier that we did and operated in the demonstration facility for over 2 years. We’re coming on to 2.25 years now. That’s good. But even better is the scale that we’re operating the machine now, we’re over 20x scale from the demo to where we are today is a scale that Fortunato has operated with in past lives and past companies. So even though this is the first time that this scale is being applied to solar panels, it is not the first time that the scale is being applied to other materials.

And so look, there’s always bugs, there’s always hiccups. But we generally are excited to get going and get operating, and we don’t expect — we certainly don’t see any fatal flaws, but we don’t — and we do expect hiccups and bumps, but like nothing that’s going to really derail our commercial process.

Zach Spencer: Thank you. Are you able to provide fiscal year guidance on revenue?

Corrado De Gasperis: So we have not provided specific guidance. There are some people out there talking. I think I want to stick with, look, we’re going to be processing a couple of thousand tons a month to start off once we get 2 or 3 months under our belt, once we’ve got further customer channel check, once we’ve got further customer visits, a lot of our customers have a box to check, which is to see this machine operating. I think it will — we’ll have much better guidance to come out from there.

Zach Spencer: Okay. Moving on to SSOF. Regarding the Silver Springs properties, how do we best think about valuation of these assets?

Corrado De Gasperis: So this is where we’ve been talking internally about prices per square foot of land. And I could say to you that the numbers that we justify our actions are single-digit prices per square foot of land. We see the market for powered land in our immediate locality, us and the surrounding communities that are doing this now in double digits. So that’s right there a remarkable thing that we’re investing at below single-digit thresholds where we expect fully to get above double-digit threshold in prices per square foot. But what we’re hearing and learning from the market is that if you’re a private company with small megawatts, I mean, if you don’t have megawatts, you’re not in the conversation. But you’re talking 5, 10, 15, 20 megawatts, you’re looking at people looking at the value of what you’re delivering in $0.5 million to, I don’t know, $0.75 million per megawatt kind of a range.

If you’re into bigger scale 100, 200, 300 megawatts, God willing 900 to a gigawatt, then you’re talking about $1 million to $4 million a megawatt. Those numbers are staggering, okay? So if you’re talking about public entities with that kind of leverage, you’re talking about high value. And this is exactly what our expectation is starting to elevate for Sierra Springs. People say, well, my God, if that’s real, then this thing is worth more than your market cap. Well, that’s what we’re picking the correct here with this thing. And that’s why we feel we need to monetize it because other people just — if people have to come in and validate it, people have to come in and transact it for anybody to believe that it’s real, we’ve got a remarkable amount of subject matter experts now coming in to give us second and third opinions on this position.

And I can tell you, the positions are very good. So it’s in progress. I’ve spent more time in the last 3 weeks on this than I spent in the last 30 weeks on it, and it feels very good. So finally, things are moving. I credit some of our directors to step in and support and helping me with this. I credit Judd for stepping in and helping to support me with this. It’s not a one-man show. We’re moving very strong. And the partners are — I want to say lining up, but I feel like they’re circling the wagons. It’s really gaining traction here. I don’t want to sound super overoptimistic. It’s very, very complex. It’s very detailed work. It’s very diligent counterparties. But I guess, rest assured that we’re doing the work to the level of detail and diligence that will meet their threshold for transacting, and we’re pretty excited about that.

Zach Spencer: With land sales, where will the capital be used?

Corrado De Gasperis: So our singular objective is to fund the growth, hopefully, exponential growth of our metals business. This is going to be a national — evolving to an international industrial materials company. The entire supply chain is being constructed. One of the things that probably we haven’t spoken about is the logistics network that the metals team is building. Our plant managers are out in California, our plant managers are out in Ohio. We’re coordinating logistics. We’re coordinating customers. We’re coordinating suppliers. And the supply chains are outstanding. I mean we’ve got some customers. In the case of glass, not only was it pleasantly surprising that we’re dealing with some of the largest glass manufacturers in the country, it was really pleasantly surprising that they have plants in some cases, within 30 minutes of our location.

So glass doesn’t travel far. When you’re getting paid $20, $30, $40 a ton for something, you can’t send it very far. So things are falling into place here very, very well. So #1 place — that #1 place is the growth of the metals business. Ideally, except for the money that we’re spending to perfect the position in Sierra Springs and perfect the power going to those lands to enable those high values, except for that money, it’s all metals. So monetize mining, redeploy to metals; monetize SSOF, redeploy to metals. So that’s the ideal scenario. We’re not funding Bioleum as we speak today. That’s the elephant in the room. We’re not funding Bioleum today. They have a runway to the end of this summer as they’re raising their capital. I feel good about them raising their capital, but we’re paying very, very close attention to that, right?

It’s a big investment. It’s a meaningful value, and we feel good about the team doing that. But right now, we have no plans to fund anything other than metals and SSOF so that it can be monetized for metals. I hope that’s clear.

Zach Spencer: Yes, it is. Thank you, Corrado. Can you provide an update on Bioleum and what you expect from the investment going forward?

Corrado De Gasperis: So I just will say two very, very salient things about Bioleum. Number one is that the bottleneck in that industry is feedstock. The bottleneck in that industry is feedstock. It’s singularly the problem of the renewable fuel industry is there’s only so much soybean and vegetable oils and so much used cooking oils. The government owns 16 billion gallons in the United States of renewable diesel and fuel, and there’s only 4 billion being produced because there’s not enough of those fat oils and greases, full stop. What does Bioleum do? It takes the most abundant woody biomass, and it converts it into the highest yielding lowest cost, lowest CI score oils for feedstock. And it does it with a dedicated crop from Hexas Biomass — so we have not only the most lowest cost, but the most reliable feedstock source.

That is a very easy pitch to make, in my opinion, to the capital markets. That pitch did not exist before a few months ago because Hexas only came online in December, and it’s taken them a couple of 3 months to fully integrate Hexas into the solution. And now they have something that I think is completely differentiated and strong. So that’s the #1 salient point about my own. The other one is they just simply need to attract the right type of right investors into that solution. So to answer your question, we would like them to get through a Series B and then go public. When they get to a Series B and then they go public, then they are a liquid investment that we have a lot of flexibility in how we monetize. Is it possible that there is an attraction to that technology that there’s attraction to that asset that they get acquired?

That’s also very possible, okay? So their route right now is Series A, Series B IPO. And I think they have a really good track to do that. The less dependency they need from us to do that, the happier we are because we have a global industrial supply chain that we’re building for our metals business.

Zach Spencer: Thank you for that, Corrado. Can you highlight capital spending for 2026?

Corrado De Gasperis: Yes. So I think Judd mentioned the $14 million was spent for the first facility, that’s done. Everything is in place. We’re waiting for the last few oven deliveries. These ovens are massive. So — but and ovens are scheduled to come last. So we’re constantly synchronizing those deliveries, but everything has arrived. Many of the oven components arrived. They’re all — they’re coming in like every other day, right? So by the end of May, we not only do we expect everything to be there and assembled, that money is spent. We’re going to spend another $1.5 million for upgrading for this glass system. We spent some of that already. The rest of it has already been ordered because these big glass companies, they say, “Hey, once you start shipping us this glass, you better not stop,” right?

So we’ve got some really big and exciting customers now that we are going to service with these materials. We will spend $10 million towards a 1 ton per day fully integrated metal recovery system, formerly known as refining, 1 ton per day metal recovery system that will start producing silver, copper, aluminum, silicon metal and also delays of very critical minerals. I don’t want to dismiss the silica and the silicon metal because think about this, 1 ton per day. If you have 1 ton per day and Fortunato is able to extract a pound of metal, we’re going to be extremely happy. If you extract a pound of metal, you still have 1,999 pounds of material. Almost all of that is silica, glass, silicon metal. If we get that to specification grades that the market is looking for, then we’re selling 100% of everything.

It’s exactly what our thesis is. That’s exactly what our marketing is. And the values that, that will portend when we’re recovering all the metals are multiples. So we’re really, really looking to get that done. Of that $10 million, Zach, some of it is the equipment, okay? But it always and almost always, and I would say almost certainly in our case, manifests itself as R&D expense. Even if you’ve got tanks and recovery cells and washers and separators, it’s going to be R&D expense because once we’ve proven the 1 ton a day, that stuff will go — parts of that stuff will go into labs, and then we’ll start building a 25-ton-per-day system, which would be more akin to the demonstration facility that we’ve been operating for over 2 years for the solar recycling.

And then once that’s proven out and the final investment decision is achieved, then we’d go to like a 250-ton a day, which would be an industry scale first-of-its-kind metal recovery facility in the United States. So to your question, $1.5 million will be spent for upgrading downstream, $10 million will be spent. We think of it as investment in a 1 ton per day recovery system. The GAAP accountants will call it R&D expense. And then we will not pull the trigger on facility #2 purchases until we’re satisfied with the ramp-up of facility #1. Originally, we were thinking that could be early like May or June, but we really feel now that the earliest it would be would be August or September. And it could be later. And we’re not in a hurry, right?

What we’re in a hurry to do is ramp up facility #1 and turn this whole down thing profitable.

Zach Spencer: Thank you, Corrado. We’re coming up on time, and I think we’ve covered all of the important questions. 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. Corrado, before we wrap up, please give us some final thoughts for the remainder of Q2 as well as overall 2026 objectives.

Corrado De Gasperis: Yes. I think I have — we’re in a great situation where I get to say that in 21 days, we’re going to be speaking again. And in 21 days, at the Annual General Meeting, we’ve already got like 50-plus people registered. So it’s going to be a great day. We’re going to take a tour of the facility. You’re going to see the showcase. Also, if you haven’t registered for that, the deadline is like 3 days away. So please make sure you register. Otherwise, we’re going to have to close that off. Logistically, we won’t be able to handle it if people are still registering. If you’ve gotten your proxies, please vote. We really would like — we’re really — we’re locked and loaded. Our Board, our management team, our balance sheet, we’re locked and loaded.

It’s all about execution. And so we will not only speak 3 weeks from now about more execution. We will show you the visuals of that showcase and that plant coming online. And then Zach from there, it’s all about the panel flow, right? The panel flow coming in and then the product sales going out like a normal real company. So we’re looking forward to that. Looking forward to seeing everybody on May 28 as well.

Zach Spencer: Definitely. Thank you, Corrado. That concludes Comstock’s First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call and Business Update. Thank you for joining us.

Corrado De Gasperis: Thanks, everyone. Speak soon.