Comstock Inc. (AMEX:LODE) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Comstock Inc. (AMEX:LODE) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript March 24, 2026

Comstock Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.24 EPS, expectations were $-0.18.

Zach Spencer: Good morning, and thank you for joining Comstock Inc.’s Full Year 2025 results and business outlook. I’m Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations. Today is Tuesday, March 24, 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-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, and issued a press release summarizing year-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 35 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 thanks for everyone being on this call. I have a few remarks, and then we’ll turn it over to Corrado, but I just want to look at the company dashboard here and just announced from a CFO’s perspective, 2025 was really a transformational year for Comstock. We really doubled the size — doubled our asset base. We strengthened and simplified our balance sheet. We eliminated legacy debt and other legacy obligations and we fully positioned the company for its next phase of growth. And our balance sheet really is the strongest it has been and it’s positioned to be even stronger as we monetize noncore assets, and it’s giving us kind of a speed advantage on our recycling competitors. Our capital structure is also very clean and our shareholder base continues to strengthen.

We continue our targeting and our outreach for what is still relatively a less known story. Less known metal story, less known financial execution and monetization priorities. And at the same time, we are beginning to see the early results of that investment, particularly in metals. Our commercialization efforts are moving us into a second more sophisticated phase. Here are some specifics that all freeing up cash and cash equivalents are stood at 56-point — or approximately $56 million at March 20, 2026. And our common shares outstanding are 74 million shares at March 20, 2026. And this is reflecting the recent offering which ended up being really outstanding, if not transformational. It’s a change in our shareholder base with significant Hood River, Gratia, MA Capital, those are just 3 that represent the top — some of the top investors that we have an engagement with them and support has been amazing, including what we just recently announced enhancements to our Board.

And really, all this is critical part of our foundation for building a global multibillion potential company and a testament of the capabilities that we have positioned. We did complete that second oversubscribed equity offering earlier this year, which brought in about $57.5 million gross proceeds, which was approximately $53 million net of offering expenses. And again, this was really driven by the demand from leading institutional investors. And what it does is it removes the largest single risk to the spend needed to capture the solar market. These funds allow us to deploy our first industry scale metals recycling facility without distraction. Secure and permit and fund facility #2, which positions us to corner the entire Southwest market right here from Nevada.

Q&A Session

We announced and build additional permitted storage sites like California, Ohio, Texas and others accelerate our refining solution and capability, including strategic partners and really position us for the best, fastest monetization of SSOF and our other noncore assets. When we look back when we started 2025, it was with huge developed potential, but really no capital resources and many, many counterparty obligations that we required to able to develop our platforms. We have effectively eliminated those obligations from our balance sheet. We did have revenues too. Comstock Metals had revenues for 2025 that was approximately $1.4 million compared to 2024 which was about $0.4 million. In addition to the reported revenue, we did generate additional billings, approximately $2.2 million in 2025.

We call it deferred revenue and that’s associated with our early operations. So about $3.5 million for all of 2025, just as we guided to. It’s also important to note that our 2025 results included several nonrecurring items associated with the transformation of our balance sheet. These costs include debt conversion and extinguishments as well as noncash impacts from changes in the fair value of derivative instruments, which is all now behind us. So last year was a deliberate effort to simplify our capital structure and eliminate legacy obligations. And these actions, we believe, significantly strengthen the company going forward. And from a liquidity standpoint, we are in a strong position. We believe our current cash, combined with expected revenues from metals recycling later this year and priority asset sales and monetization, all that keeps us strong and in a leading position as we execute on the metals plan.

And lastly, we are lining up and diligent seen and positioning more traditional nondilutive sources, which includes grants and industrial bonds, which we will qualify for and we’ll have access to once our first facility is up and running this year. So those are my remarks. I’ll turn it over now to Corrado to dive deeper into our metals progress and monetization.

Corrado De Gasperis: Thanks, Judd. Thanks, everyone, for being here. We probably have a record attendance for this call. So I’m really — I’m excited about the update. Let me start with the announcement that we made just after the market closed today, which for us is incredibly exciting and encouraging. As Judd mentioned, at the end of January, we had a robustly oversubscribed offering. We had tremendous quality of institutional investors. He named a few, Hood River, MA Capital, Gratia. I mean the list continues on down to a solid 25, 30 institutions that joined. What was even more encouraging was Steve Pei, Gratia, Craig and Mike Kaufman, the interest that was taken in the company is very, very high, including site visits, including reviews and tours of all of our assets and quite frankly, extremely constructive engagement about support and help for how do we position this company to be a truly global, truly dominant, metal recycling company.

I think that reflects a view that our technology is differentiated. I think it reflects a view that we have a really, really early adopter head start. I think it reflects a view that we did make good progress with this balance sheet. If you go back to the shareholder letter from last January, it was a tough letter, but the message was we need to clean things up. We need to get recapitalized and we need to fund these growth businesses. So if people go back and look at that letter, we could say, wow, we made huge progress. But now we have that posture. So the hard work is now the execution. And how do you take a platform that’s regional? Sure, half of the end-of-life market is in the Southwest region. United States, absolutely Nevada and these Nevada permits and platform positions us to capture it.

But it’s much bigger than that. The United States has over 1.3 billion panels deployed. They’re coming end of life rapidly, and that’s only 1/8 of the world. The world has just as big of a dilemma, 8x relative to the U.S. So the conversation was around expanding governance, expanding international business competency, accessing capital markets competency. So we’re thrilled to announce the addition of 3 new independent directors. Donald Colvin, who has extensive and frankly, complex financial management background, but a very, very strong solar industry experience being the Chair and a Board member of a public solar manufacturer of global footprint and just the global public company governance posture from chairing boards to chairing audit committees.

And then Steve Pei, as I mentioned, with extensive, I mean, quite remarkable capital markets background, entrepreneurial, what was intriguing was the notion of investing in smaller early-stage companies and watching them become national or international successes and watching those values increase dramatically. And then Bob Spence, who has an exceptional background in refining, in recycling and electrification recycling to boot, including international operations, 30-plus international sites in public and international governance experience, both from audit, from acquisition, from oversight. We really could have spent a couple of years working on the searching and recruiting and aligning and onboarding of our Board. We really jump-started that.

So I think from a perspective of really, really strong platform that can really handle all of the things that are coming, sweeping across the U.S. We’ve got a really good plan for that. But this won’t stop there. This market is just extraordinary. So we’re welcoming our expanded Board. And I guess the final takeaway is when 2 of your top 4 investors are represented on your Board, that screams a lot. We couldn’t be more thankful Steve Pei of Gratia. Michael Kaufman at MAK, Craig and the rest of the team that just worked so, so diligently to make all this happen for us. We thank you very, very much. And for 2026, that team, that governance structure, that capital base is aligned, right? We’re aligned on these objectives, which is very, very much, first and foremost, to monetize our noncore legacy mining assets.

We’ve gone from a few years ago talking to less than credible people to talking to marginally capable people to now being engaged with very, very serious mining counterparties that absolutely like what we have here, what we’ve maintained here, which is a great mining district, great resources. If there’s any question about this decision, let me put everybody’s mind at rest. Every dollar that we take from the mining assets and put into the recycling assets multiplies exponentially. And let’s be clear, if we were going to mine these assets it would take $30 million, $40 million, maybe $50 million of capital to put a mine into production. That’s with an existing resource and a permitted platform. There would still be a lot to do. So in that context, it’s money that doesn’t go to solar recycling.

That’s a nonstarter for us. It never was a starter for us, frankly. But every dollar that we can then pull out of that nonproductive asset and put into the recycling business, I think a few of you heard me say, our mining assets, which we believe have good value and are very attractive, have about 2.5 million ounces of silver in situ just in the Dayton resource alone. And yes, that would take 6 or 7 years to mine once the mine got up and running. 2 of our facilities in Nevada, which we now know where they’re going to be and they’re up and getting up and running, would produce that much silver annually, okay? That’s just 2, not 7. So you can see the difference in throughput and cash generation from what you could call 2 different silver mines.

We also want to monetize our noncore legacy real estate. I’m going to give you more transparency on that today simply because we finally came to sufficient progress, both with Sierra Springs’ Board and company and with third parties that are very, very interested in these assets. The value is higher, the ownership is higher. So the amount that we’re going to monetize here, hopefully, will be pleasantly higher than anyone might have been expecting. So we’re going to do both of those things. Green Li-ion, we also want to monetize. It’s less within our control. The company is making extraordinary progress, truly exceeded my expectations in terms of their journey to profitability. They have an operating facility in Oklahoma. We own 13% of the company.

And they’ve announced that they’re going to move into a public listing in Australia sometime later this year. So once Green Li-ion is successful in its endeavor to becoming a public company, then we’ll have a much easier and clearer exit strategy for that investment. We’ve worked very, very hard on all these monetization items. This is the crux of the corporate objectives. We’ve had to put more capital into Sierra Springs but at great gain. That wasn’t clear before because the deals weren’t structured and they weren’t announced, but they are now structured. And we’ve already taken effectively what was just under 17% of Sierra Springs to well over 36%, 37%. That number could end up easily at well over 50% for something that we think has hundreds of millions of dollars of value.

We don’t think that based on conjecture, there is monster engagement in Northern Nevada right now because if you’re able to secure sufficient power to the land, it’s in immediate demand. If you’re not able to secure sufficient power to the land, there’s no interest, okay? So we’re on the verge of something very meaningfully here. I think 2026, credibly now, we’ll see monetization of mining, monetization of noncore real estate. And frankly, timing couldn’t be better. So we’re really all about supporting the exponential growth of the metals business, not just for national dominance really for setting the global standard in this recycling business. We crushed it in ’25. And when I say we, I mean the metals team, Fortunato, Paul, Kayla, I mean, they got the permits, first of its kind.

Leo was absolutely instrumental in supporting us, one of our Board members in navigating through that regulatory regime. We didn’t only get first-of-its-kind permits. We were held to what we originally thought was a ridiculously high standard. But now with hindsight, it looks like it will be very difficult for any existing competitor that we know of to even set foot in Nevada and even get permits within 2 years. So to the extent Nevada sits on 50% of the end-of-life market, certainly between now and 2030, now and 2035, wow, we’re literally on the beachhead of a battle that doesn’t see any competitors anywhere near of what we’ve positioned here. We don’t want to stop in the Southwest region because that’s only half the market. We want to get to the rest of the U.S., and that will come, as Judd said, with less resistance and much more rapidly.

We also have designed the engineered process for recovering the metals from our tailings. I’ll give you a little bit more color on that. But we did that with leveraging a handful of partners between universities and companies that have existing assets and existing infrastructure that allows us to take Fortunato’s engineered design and very efficiently test up to a demo, which we hope to have here by the end of this year. So all that work in 2025 really positioned us to move fast, right? So what do we want to do? We want to get this facility up and running. Substantially all of the equipment has arrived. The ovens are arriving now and the ovens literally represent — I just looked at the final truck schedules, represents 20 full 18-wheelers.

So you start to get a sense of the magnitude of this process and these systems. Some of you have come and visited and I’ll show some pictures of some of the equipment as it’s getting assembled here. But it’s all coming in, we’re on schedule. It wouldn’t be right to say that 3 or 4 weeks of slippage hasn’t occurred, but that was already buffered in our schedule. So commissioning in Q1, operating in Q2 holds. We’re very happy about that, bringing the thing online. And another thing that’s happening is that we’re starting to see — it’s almost like if you’re in the fourth quarter of a football game, you’re starting to see some of our competition, take a knee or move aside. Really, that’s an analogy to say that our customers, the true utility scale companies that are now very seriously engaged in a very big end-of-life problem.

They’re almost only — they’re certainly not talking to the 2 or 3 people that we previously talked about as showing up most often. So there’s a really good trend there. Something even more strategic is happening. Some of these institutions are either very, very large or part of even larger organizations, and they’ve engaged us for more strategic things. You’ve heard me talk about co-locating on one of the sites or venturing into a third or fourth site. This all ties to getting market share, right? So we want to dominate the market share. We’re very happy with how those underlying conversations are going. And we’ve identified the second site. We are pinning it down, final stages. The permits actually have already been submitted. So we’re excited about it.

It will be in Clark County. It will be just outside of Las Vegas, exactly where we wanted to position the second site for this Southwest region. And California is permitted up and running. Ohio is coming up in line. Those right now are primarily either storage and/or transition activities, prep activities, logistics activities. There’s no processing. There’s no processing that we’re planning at all for California, but certainly, Ohio would evolve into that, and we’re looking as well at a specific site in Texas. So that side of things are moving very, very quickly and we’re continuing all of those efforts. ’26 is going to be — as foundational as ’25 was ’26 is going to show the light. ’26 is going to show the large industrial system running.

It’s going to show it turning profitable. It’s going to show volumes increasing. And you’re going to see revenue goes from $100,000 a month to $200,000 a month to $1 million a month to $2 million a month. That’s our profile for 2026. And we don’t see any reason why that isn’t going to come together just like that. So we don’t need to talk that much about silver demand. Every one of you that I’ve talked to seems to understand the supply and demand equation for silver and is very bullish on it. Even with some pullback, we’re sitting at $70 silver, which is above anything that we’ve modeled in our process. As I mentioned previously, even at $60 silver, our offtake revenue isn’t $125 a ton. It’s $375 a ton. So we already have an enhanced profile given the current realities.

You see the inside of 600 Lake in this picture, that was 7 months ago. Now when you look at the inside of 600 Lake, it’s assembling equipment. That shine that you see on the floor there is an epoxy that we had to lay down that outlines perfectly the footprint of the large system. You can’t see the ends of the footprint. It’s extremely large, 80, 90, 100 feet of processing, fully integrated, fully automated. We are testing the robotic arms. We are assembling the front-end crushers. We are pulling together all of the equipment. And we’re heavily finalizing the grading and the preparation. Fencing is going to go up next week for the storage. And it just gives you some context here. If you’re looking at this picture, hopefully, that building there in the background is where our demo facility sits, okay?

So we’re talking about major — I kept saying like this enormous expansion or massive expansion for storage, you’re starting to get a sense of it. I was annoyed earlier, one of our investors posted 4 beautiful pictures. They must have been circling the site or something. I criticized my team and said, these guys are getting better pictures than I’m getting. So if you’re on Twitter or X, you can see some even more elaborate pictures of this development that’s happening real time. And the holy grail is not getting $125 a ton for tailings or $375 a ton for tailings. Those numbers reflect us capturing 50% or 60% of the silver value and leaving the silicon metal and leaving the copper and depending on the types of panel, leaving the gallium or the tellurium or the iridium behind, what we’ve applied it for a grant on and what we’ve already started the development work on is being able to capture the substantial majority, we’d love to say substantially all of the value from those critical metal recoveries from the tailings.

So we’ve been ridiculously busy site preparing. We’ve been ridiculously busy receiving equipment. We’ve been busy expanding the market, and that would be satisfactory. But it’s been exceptional that the team has made and forced the capacity to design this refining solution. We don’t — when we say we feel like we’re a couple of years ahead in recycling, we’re humble about that. We’re not arrogant about it. We want to expand it. We want to assume we’re 1 day ahead. We don’t want to assume we’re 2 years ahead. But we’re talking about recycling. We’re not talking about refining. We don’t see anybody even talking about these types of refining solutions. And the reason this is so important, and I think the reason our capital base is so interested is 3.5 million panels last year would load one of our production lines.

In 4 years, that number is going to be 33 million. We would need 10 production lines to do that. And I’m not sure if people appreciate it. One production line that $13 million of one production line can do 3.3 million panels a year. But that facility that you just saw, it was permitted for 2.5 production lines, really 3 production lines with the capacity of doing 250,000. So if this Southwest region does anything close to what we think it’s going to do, it’s doubling the capacity, 2.5x in the capacity of that facility will have literally 0 permitting lead time. 0 permitting lead time. It’s already permitted. What it will require, of course, is equipment ordering lead time, which we can let the market tell us when to trigger that. And this is the old map that most of you have seen.

But for any of you that haven’t, here’s Arizona, Nevada, California. These are the 1.3 billion, 1.4 billion panels that are deployed in the U.S. The fatter the circle, the older the panel. That’s why these 2 facilities in Nevada are so critical and why we’re going after this half of the market so diligently, so vigorously. But an enhanced metal value, you’re not talking about $55 million or $60 million of cash flow from one facility running full. You’re talking about $75 million to $80 million for one facility running full. And that doesn’t consider the enhancement that would come with the refining solution. Now let me just spend a little bit more time on this monetization of noncore assets. Some of you may have seen previously a higher NPV that we calculated for our mining assets.

That number was correct. It stays correct. But as I said earlier, these assets take some capital to put into production. As I said earlier, we’re engaged with some very, very serious counterparties. They have capital. That’s, I guess, the litmus test for me on, are they serious? They have capital. They have capital to deploy, and we’re talking about a range of value of, let’s say, $50 million or $60 million. We’re not necessarily talking about all cash upfront, but we are talking about full monetization. What we would like to do is sell it for all cash or we’ll sell it for cash with some very relevant or meaningful milestones. Any dollar that we pull out of nonproductive assets to put in our solar business, we believe, is a home run. With the Sierra Springs, we have been allocating capital to that.

You’ll see that it increased. But we have agreement now to convert that into ownership at extraordinary values. And I’m going to talk about that a little bit more. I’m going to give you a little bit more color. But I’ve been busy with this because it’s super active, right? Nevada went through a monstrous hyperscale data center expansion. It’s listed right now as fifth or sixth in the U.S. with projects under construction with 29 projects under construction, and it’s every big name. We have an industrial park very, very close to us, not the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Park. Everybody knows about that. Another one that’s very close to us in Silver Springs that is out soliciting industrial lands for this purpose, and they secured access to power other than the grid.

The grid is tapped out. The grid is not available until God knows when. So we secured similarly access to that power required some small financial commitment initially, a small bond, $1 million, $1.5 million of posting, which was easy, but it opened up the whole world for us. Now we’ve got — I’ll be very frank, like I’m behind in being responsive to them. And if that’s annoying to you, it should be because it’s annoying to me. But the dollars that we’re talking about are not $45 million or $50 million like we talked about before. It’s a couple of hundred million. And that doesn’t include our properties that we own 100% and directly. So as you can see, it’s in everybody’s interest for us to prioritize and monetize these assets. The mining assets last year, we acquired the Haywood quarry.

You see it right here, this Haywood target on the map. We also sold some of the northern properties, which are now taken off of this map. But in selling those northern properties, we also got these green — there’s about 240 acres that we added that fully support and surround both the mining of the Dayton asset and the processing for the Dayton asset. We have those 230 acres at no additional consideration. So between the Haywood property, which is ideal for processing Dayton and those other properties, which fully support the mining and the processing of Dayton, we’ve made this much more salable much more monetizable. And as I said earlier, we’re fully engaged. When we first announced that Haywood purchase, some people were like, I thought we weren’t interested in mining.

I thought we were trying to monetize the mining. And I just want to make it clear, that’s exactly what those moves were designed to position us for. And these properties, they’re flat, they’re expansive and they’re very, very attractive to real miners. So we’re really having productive conversations. Judd is getting very, very close, and I really appreciate that helping that support. Now just more transparency on Sierra Springs because there’s approval on the Sierra Springs side, right? There is approval for Comstock to take the lead, for Comstock to drive this thing to the finish line, for Comstock to enable this bigger monetization. And of course, Comstock needs to benefit dramatically from that capacity. What where we are is we’re sitting in the largest opportunity zone, if not the largest, one of, by far, the largest opportunity zones in the United States.

It’s not only an expansive amount of land sitting right by Lake Tahoe, the fact that it’s 10 miles from the California border and maybe more importantly, 1 truck day away from 7 different states and 75 million people is one of the biggest reasons that all of these data centers and all of these manufacturing companies are locating here. The other reason is that it’s the environmental climate is almost perfect for optimal cooling of these data centers. But it’s even more than that. It’s literally Nevada — Northern Nevada is literally one of the safest places in the country when it comes to the hazard map or the disaster avoidance map. We don’t have hurricanes. We don’t have hailstorms. We don’t have all of these impediments. And so it’s not coincidence that Google, Apple, Microsoft Switch, Tract and at least 2 dozen more are locating here for mega hyperscaling.

And for us, it was when USA Parkway was built from a nonexistent road to a dirt road to a 4-lane super highway, connecting Reno right down into Silver Springs where my better lucky than good comment keeps coming out. We were sitting right there ready to receive that ball. It’s still somewhat pioneering 2 years ago. Everything was happening in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center. Everything is happening up in Fernley. And people kept saying, well, what about Silver Springs? What about Silver Springs? Well, if you look at the map this way, you see this connecting highway. Tesla’s gigafactor is really what put us on the map, but the data centers are really what exploded the map. It comes right down to our properties. You see the Comstock load here just 30 minutes down the road, Highway 50, and then you see the congregation of this asset here.

I haven’t spoken about this much because we spend — Fortunato and the team spent 110% of their time on Comstock Metals. I like to think I spend 50% of my time supporting Comstock Metals. I want that to be 90% of my time. Judd is handling the monetization of the mining assets. I’m handling the monetization of Sierra Springs. And I think it’s also important to say I’ve never took a penny from Silver Springs. I’ve never gotten any compensation from Sierra Springs. I only own stock there because I bought it with my own money, and I’ve agreed to rectify that. Like we are going to align my interest only and solely with LODE. There is no even debate or discussion about it. I’ve already committed to it, right? What you’re going to see with hopefully some foresight, but certainly soon with hindsight is that load investors own something very, very valuable here.

As exciting as monetizing something that’s worth a couple of hundred million potentially would be, what can be done with that money in solar recycling is a whole other level of excitement. You can read up all the articles about what’s happening in Northern Nevada. It’s very easy to see them. But what’s really important to see is that — when I talk about these values, I’m not pulling them out of the air. When we first started this thing, we were getting these properties for dirt. I mean, literally dirt cheap with almost like water rights coming for free. But Industrial Park was at $2 to $3, $4 a square foot. Then it was $4 to $5 a square foot. Then it was $6 to $8 a square foot. Then Microsoft lands and starts pushing $10 a square foot. Those are incredible numbers.

If those numbers — if we’re even close to those types of numbers, my numbers will be understated. So when Tract CEO came out and said that they’re going to invest $100 billion in the next 10 years in Northern Nevada. And that means from the Peru shelf right up here by Switch to right across the street from our properties in Silver Springs. There’s 3 major developments that they’re breaking ground on right now. If you don’t understand it or if you’d like to see it, it will only take you 20 minutes for Reno to see Monster trapped platforms being built and positioned. So that only enhances the value like everything in this area. And if you look at this map, the airport being the blue center, everything else in color around us is part of our portfolio that I want to monetize for us, except the top of #11 here.

That’s where Microsoft came in. And then right alongside of it, Tract is coming in. So you go from literally being out in the middle of nowhere on the loneliest highway in America to USA Parkway plugging into us to track and Microsoft coming in across the street. I mean it’s extraordinarily exciting, but none of it would mean anything if the he Great Basin natural gas transmission company didn’t show up 4 months ago and say, we’re going to spend a couple of billion dollars, and we’re going to expand gas into this area, into firmly into Tri-Center, literally right into Silver Springs. If they didn’t come out and say that, we’d still be talking about why the hell are we going to — why can’t we sell these properties. But with that power commitment, the game has changed dramatically, and we’re going to see something really exciting happen.

So it took a little bit longer than I was expecting. I apologize. But Zach, please let’s just jump into Q&A.

Zach Spencer: All right. Thank you, Corrado. As I mentioned at the beginning of the call, we received more than 35 questions prior to the call. And I can see that we have a number of additional questions coming through Zoom. And Corrado, you did touch on a lot of these questions that we have. So perhaps you can just provide a little more color. And pardon me if I do repeat the question. Okay. The first question is, how do you allocate your time versus Judd’s time versus the rest of the team’s time.

Corrado De Gasperis: Yes. So I think right now, in fairness, Judd’s spending — obviously, you can see the time we spent from a corporate perspective on recapitalizing and funding and now over the last month or so on the governance. So that’s really positive and took a little bit more of our time critically, critically constructive and needed. I think probably I will spend 40% to 50% of my time, and I expect Judd the same on monetizing these noncore assets, okay? It’s a priority. And thank God, the metals team is full, and they’ll spend 110% of their time. They do nothing but metals all day long and all night long. But I do feel like if we were directly just a solar panel recycling company, just a metal company, we would go from having a strong, capable, sufficient management team to overwhelming force.

And so I think ultimately, we’d like to see 80% metals, 20% corporate. But that will only happen once we monetize the assets. So 50% ours, 50% corporate, but that 50% is heavily dedicated to monetizing these assets. And the prerequisites needed to monetize those assets.

Zach Spencer: All right, Corrado, thank you for that. What is the pipeline of solar panels that will be available to recycle through the Silver Springs facility once it is open?

Corrado De Gasperis: Yes. So that’s one of the most major fronts of our efforts. We’re signing master service agreements. We’re signing master service agreements all the time right now. We’ve signed a couple of extraordinary ones with e-recyclers, the folks that have already established recycling businesses. That’s about 10% to 15% of the market. We generally think about the major utilities as being 80% of the market. And so what’s happening right now is we’re signing up — we’re — I don’t — I can’t think of a major utility that we’ve had a setback on — and that includes NextEra, Florida Light and Power, everyone is pretty familiar with RWE, Nevada Energy, which is a Berkshire Hathaway, Berkshire Energy company, Brookfield.

Edison. I mean we’re really making hay with signing these folks up, right? The second point is we’re signing up. I think we may have just signed up. We’re not yet allowed to release it specifically, but one of the largest, if not the largest e-recyclers in the country, right? So those are the people we want to engage. We’ve also signed up our first actual solar manufacturing company, which I was talking to Don about this as we were going through the Board process. But the solar manufacturers are not really our customers. They do have some amount of breakage and waste. So they’re steady Eddie. They ship us a truck or 2 a week, but they’re a very, very small part of the end-of-life market. Of course, they’re the beginning of life market. But they also point us to their customers, and they also integrate us with their returns.

And so that’s all coming along. But to answer your question, locking in the customer is the most critical prerequisite, making sure that we’re qualified through their audits and their certification processes. It’s not a super long lead time process, but it’s a pretty meaningful lead time process. So we’ve been doing that steadily for the last 2 years. And so as I think I mentioned earlier, and there is a breakthrough, too. There’s a number of customers who — their attitude is where you’re certified, you’re qualified, you’re wonderful. When the big machine is up and running, we’ll start sending more panels because we want our certificate of destruction pretty rapidly, okay? So but the profile should be a couple of hundred thousand dollars a month to $0.5 million a month to $1 million a month to $2 million a month.

$2 million a month is $25 million — $24 million, $25 million run rate of revenue that will be remarkably profitable, and then we just grow it from there. We still believe that by the end of 2027, Facility #1 will be running full. Facility #2 should be in the 20% to 30% capacity utilization range. But those are really rough estimates, right? Because we don’t see a smooth linear up progression here. We see a lot of spiking. We see a lot of deferred maintenance. We see a lot of deferred recycling. So once we click in, then the spikes will be bumpier. We have the capacity to handle it, and then we have the storage to handle it. Now one critical point here. We are now being engaged by not just the largest utilities, but the owners of the largest utilities, very strategic discussions.

There is a recognition here that they need to lock up some capacity, right? So it’s finally coming through and those hope to have some very meaningful discussions this year. What I mean to say is we’re having very meaningful discussions now, very meaningful outcomes this year in terms of what specifically that will mean, right, to forward volumes. It’s coming, right? It’s just — it’s slower than anyone would ever hope, but the — setting the foundation is the critical thing. One of the ways I’ve described this to people is if our business this year was 20,000 or 30,000 tons, the same exact customer flow in 2030 would be 300,000 tons. Right? These are the customers who are going to see a 10x increase in their end of life. They may even be higher because they’re going to lead that increase in end of life, the 3.5 million from last year to 33 million in 2030.

So we’re positioning for great — almost organic growth. It’s kind of a perverse or backwards way of thinking about it, but locking in the customers that really have the biggest installations means locking in the biggest end-of-life replacement scheme. Sorry for that. It was a little long-winded, but…

Zach Spencer: This might be a short one for you. Where do we stand with the delivery of the first recycling facility in terms of timing and cost?

Corrado De Gasperis: So we have — I think we received all of our equipment and started to receive the components for the oven. I just — It was mentioned it earlier, I just looked at the shipping schedules for the ovens. It’s literally like 20 monster 18-wheel truckload containers. I was surprised at the magnitude of the logistics, right, to get those ovens to us. Those are starting — the schedule said they start coming next week. They stop coming within 2 weeks, then we have everything. And then we’ve already started installation. We’ve already started testing and commissioning the equipment. If those ovens had arrived 4 weeks ago, they would be sitting around because the sequence is pretty precise in terms of what needs to be installed and tested and then processed. So in that regard, we feel again, maybe 3 or 4 weeks of slippage that was fully buffered in our plans, right? So we’ll be up and running in Q2, and I think that’s going to be a huge milestone.

Zach Spencer: And speaking of Sequence, please review the timetable for the second recycling project. So its initial revenue and probable location.

Corrado De Gasperis: Yes. Yes. It’s going to be outside of Vegas. Clark County for sure. That’s where all the infrastructure is. There’s more infrastructure in Clark County in Vegas than there is in Silver Springs, frankly. We have a site. We’re in final stages of locking down the terms. We’ve already submitted the permit because we know where the site is. I think the question is when do we order the equipment. Last time I asked Fortunato, he said as soon as we possibly can because the equipment lead times from — when we first — we raised the money in August, we ordered the equipment the next day. We were looking at a 5- to 6-month lead time. It turned out to be 7 to 8, okay? So if 7 to 8 is the real lead time, although I think there’s some arguments now that we’ve gone through this process that it would be shorter, then we probably want to order the equipment sooner rather than later.

So if you’re quoting equipment in May, you could have it arriving in December, the process should look and feel maybe 3 months faster from a calendar perspective than the first facility or could mirror it very closely, right? Commissioning in Q1, operating in Q2. I’d love to see commissioning in Q4 operating in Q1. And as soon as we order the equipment, we’ll be able to communicate that.

Zach Spencer: Okay. And sticking with Comstock Metals, you’ve outlined a 7-facility national model with a central refinery hub. What is the capital requirement per facility at the scale you’re targeting?

Corrado De Gasperis: So we’ve always said recycling facility 12 to 15, okay? And really, that range is tied to if we’re leasing a facility, it’s $13 million. That’s where we’re ending up, right, with facility #1. If we had to buy a facility, you might have to put a deposit down, it might be $15 million, maybe $16 million at the most. So it’s a nice tight range. It’s not a lot. $12 million to $15 million, we’ll stick with, maybe $13 million to $16 million is buffered. That’s a good number. And that’s for each facility. As you heard earlier, $75 million plus in cash flow and they’re running full. So that profile is beautiful. The central refinery, though, is still conceptual, like we are certainly not going to build 7 refineries.

Ideally, there could be 1 maybe very centrally located. For the math on that is if a recycling facility is taking in 100,000 tons and 10% to 15% are tailings, you’re going to get midpoint, 12,500 tons of tailings per year per facility. If you have 7 facilities, that’s 100,000 tons of tailings. That’s a pretty good sized refining operation. You could start with one in Nevada, and that would be — if you did that, you’d probably either have one big one there or you might have one on the West Coast, Nevada-based, one on the East Coast, then you’d have 2. We don’t know the answer to that yet. We still need to get to FID on the engineering, but we’re projecting the capital for one large refining operation like that 100,000 ton of intake level to be about $30 million, right?

So in the scheme of — in the universe of refining capital, it’s low, right? When people talk about aluminum refineries and pyrolytic refineries and smelters, they think in the billions, like not in our scenario. We’re very precise, very fine industrial tailing. So that’s more what we’re looking like. I hope that answers the question.

Zach Spencer: Corrado, pivoting to SSOF. The values sound high. What are the prerequisites for monetizing these assets? And what’s the time line?

Corrado De Gasperis: Yes. So I think, look, there’s probably 5 prerequisites. Let’s just think them through. industrially zoned land, check, flat developable land, super check, water rights, check, fiber check, electricity, right? That fifth one is where as we sort of hit the wall, if I could give people context, right, the Great Basin Transmission Company came out with an open bid. This is a FERC-regulated utility bid. We committed to like 50,000 dekatherms a day. I think they got bids for 800,000 dekatherms. So if our number is 300 megawatts, their number is 15x that, 13x that. So that’s real. That’s certified. That tells you what’s happening in Northern Nevada in terms of people needing, wanting and committing capital to power.

So what we need to do is we need to close out on the land position. There’s still some capital required to do that, close out on the land position, have clean title, clean and final environmental reports. We’ve already done Phase 1 previously, super clean, so no issues. You just need to be updated, right? Water rights certification we have thousands of acre feet of water rights. That allows for a lot of flexibility with the data centers. Some are — there was a phase of all electric cooling, then the grids ran out of electricity. Now everybody is hell bent on the technologies that reduce water in data cooling, but you got to have water rights, right? So if we do those 3 things, right, just perfect the land, perfect the power, I feel there’s a little capital there, but there is also administrative work, like probably 60 days’ worth of work.

That timing would be perfect, data room would open up and then 60- to 90-day process. So we’re looking at — we’re absolutely looking at 2026, getting this done in 2026.

Zach Spencer: Thank you, Corrado. We do have a question on Bioleum management. Please provide an update on the Bioleum team.

Corrado De Gasperis: Absolutely. So I think most people appreciate that in March of last year, Marathon Petroleum invested directly into what was previously known as Comstock Fuels. And then in May, a large investor came in with another direct investment. It’s about $35 million in total of, call it, Series A investment directly into the newly reestablished Bioleum Corporation. There’s a really strong core group of founders, I say 10 people, David Winsness, Rahul Bobbili, but there’s Chad, Michael Black. There’s a strong group of founders there, but there’s an even bigger group. There’s probably 40 professionals. And let me just say this. Their whole claim to fame, they’re equivalent of Fortunato’s zero landfill, highly efficient thermal solution is their ability to unlock lignin in woody biomass.

So we call it lignocellulosic technology. But that company’s roster includes like Dr. Christian Dahlstrand from Sweden, Dr. Marcus Jawerth from Sweden, Dr. Colin Anson from Madison, Jordan Thutt from Wausau, Dr. Elvis Ebikade from New York, originally from Nigeria, Dana Hatch, Bob Rzmirek, Andrew Hell, these are all chemists and chemical engineers. And then you have Dr. Gregg Beckham at the National Laboratory of the Rockies, previously known as NREL, Dr. Yuriy Roman at MIT. Like you’re literally talking about the top 10 lignocellulosic professionals like in the world. And what their coming out with here is the highest yielding lowest carbon ability to take waste into low carbon fuels. But it kind of — people probably feel — so that’s the management answer, right?

Chad Michael Black is the President. Chad is leading this incredible group, right, of primarily engineers and material scientists, right, to final investment decision that allows them to move into biorefining. We haven’t gone stealth per se with Bioleum, but there was a concerted effort for them to be independent for them to have their own capital source, for them to ultimately go Series B and IPO. So as you hear me talk about monetizing assets, I don’t — I’m happy to be supportive. I’m happy to be helpful and I am intimate with what they’re doing. But their success will be our success, right? We want to put our calories into growing a literally international dominant metal recycling business.

Zach Spencer: Thank you, Corrado. Looking at our mining assets, what is the timing on the potential monetization of the mining assets? Would it be a JV deal or something different?

Corrado De Gasperis: I think I’m hopeful that the timing is sooner. We are in pretty deep conversations. We are pretty specific around terms. And we’re only talking to people that have credible and immediate — not immediate, but credible and almost immediate access to capital. Like we’re not talking about people who are blue skying possibilities here. So the people that we’re talking to have done quite a bit of diligence, like, I would say, a tremendous amount. But just from a legal, administrative final processes, you’re probably looking at 75 to 90 days. Is it guaranteed — could something bust for sure, but we’re feeling pretty good about it.

Zach Spencer: Thank you for that. Pivoting again, is there any intention for issuing additional shares in the near term, resulting in any more dilution?

Corrado De Gasperis: No. I would like to repeat, though, what I had said earlier. We had 7 or 8 years of excruciatingly poor access to the capital markets, bad structures, bad efforts, probably with hindsight, using a junior mining penny stock structure to capitalize to high-growth innovative technologies was not the smartest thing in the world. But at the same time, we did it, right? We created an incredible opportunity. And I think our investors that stuck with us and our new investors that came in are really, really, really going to profit from that scenario. If there’s a perception that we enjoyed raising the capital that way or the dilution that resulted and even more painfully, the low valuation that comes from having other than intermediate and longer-term capital partners, we hated it.

So just in case anybody is curious, like we hated it. But we did get this business launched, and we’re running now. But what’s more important is we have capital partners. We have capitalized and funded. And I think if we had no noncore assets, the positive of that would be that we would be more fully dedicated to metals. But the positive of having them is, as I said earlier, if we monetize those assets and redeploy them, if we monetize those assets and redeploy them, then we have a bonanza on our hands here. We are derisked from distraction. We are derisked from having to slow down. We see some of our recycling competitors struggling to raise capital. We’ve seen some take capital from very bad sources and do a 180-degree turnaround on their strategy.

So we’re just going to keep flying forward, and we don’t see any — we have no — we don’t see any reason looking forward, right, that we would have to raise money. If something unknown happened, and we can talk about it, but like we don’t see it unequivocal, no.

Zach Spencer: Thank you, Corrado. We’re coming up on time, and I think we’ve covered several 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 final week of Q1 and the rest of 2026.

Corrado De Gasperis: Yes. I’m super excited about our new Board members. They’ve already reached out wanting to start engaging and coming back out to visit. I’m super excited about the work leading up to the annual meeting in May. I think that if you can come to the meeting in person, we’re going to take a bus down to Silver Springs. And on the way to Silver Springs, we’ll go to the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center and you’ll see about 10 million square feet under construction on the way to it. It’s probably relevant to point out that 600 Lake Avenue, this incredibly ideal location for solar panel recycling and 800 Lake Avenue, the Monstrous like storage facility right next door, our Sierra Springs properties. Sierra Springs owning those properties allowed us to pivot very, very quickly into the solar recycling business.

And I think with hindsight, speed is the winner in all fronts here. And then stay tuned for customer announcements, stay tuned. We’re going to — we’ll be more active next week, the week after the week after and the week after with pictures of the ovens, the assemblies, the commissioning and then panels starting to go through the machine. We’re really at the inflection point here of 3.5, 4 years of incredibly hard work. So pretty exciting.

Zach Spencer: Thank you very much, Corrado. That concludes Comstock’s year-end 2025 earnings call and business update. Thank you all for joining us.

Corrado De Gasperis: Thank you all.