Comstock Inc Full Year 2025 Earnings Call - Nevada Recycling Plant Nears Commissioning as Big Asset Monetizations Get Real

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: 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, L-O-D-E. 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, Chief Financial Officer, Comstock Inc.: Thanks, Zach, and thanks for everyone being on this call. I have a few remarks, and then we’ll turn it over to Corrado. I just wanna look at the company dashboard here and just announce, you know, from a CFO’s perspective, 2025 was really a transformational year for Comstock. You know, we really 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. Our balance sheet really is the strongest it has been, and it’s positioned to be even stronger as we monetize non-core 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. You know, less-known metal story, less-known financial execution and monetization priorities. At the same time, we’re 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 I’ll bring up. Cash and cash equivalents stood at approximately $56 million at March 20, 2026. Our common shares outstanding are 74 million shares at March 20, 2026. This is reflecting the recent offering, which ended up being really outstanding, if not transformational. You know, it was a change in our shareholder base with significant, you know, Hood River, Gratia, MAK Capital.

Those are just three that represent the top, some of the top investors that we have. Engagement with them and support has been amazing, including what we just recently announced enhancements to our board. Really, all this is critical part of our foundation for building a global multi-billion potential company and a testament to the capabilities that we have positioned. We did complete that second oversubscribed equity offering earlier this year, which brought in about $57.5 million in gross proceeds, which was approximately $53 million net of offerings expenses. Again, this was really driven by the demand from leading institutional investors. 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 number two, which positions us to corner the entire Southwest market right here from Nevada. We announce 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 non-core assets. You know, when we look back when we started 2025, it was with huge developed potential, but really no capital resources and many counterparty obligations that we required, you know, to enable us 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.

It was approximately $1.4 million compared to 2024, which was about $4.4 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. 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 non-recurring items associated with the transformation of our balance sheet. These costs include, you know, debt conversion and extinguishments, as well as non-cash impacts from changes in the fair value of derivative instruments, which is all now behind us. You know, last year was a deliberate effort to simplify our capital structure and eliminate legacy obligations.

These actions, we believe, significantly strengthen the company going forward. From a liquidity standpoint, you know, 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, you know, as we execute on the metals plan. Lastly, we are lining up and diligently seeking and positioning more traditional non-dilutive sources, which includes grants and industrial bonds, which we will qualify for and will have access to once our first facility is up and running this year. Those are my remarks. I’ll turn it over now to Corrado to dive deeper into our metals progress and monetization.

Corrado De Gasperis, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: Thanks, Judd. Thanks, everyone for being here. We probably have a record attendance, you know, for this call, so I’m really 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. We, 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, MAK Capital, Gratia. I mean, the list continues on, you know, down to, you know, a solid 25, you know, 30 institutions that joined.

What was even more encouraging was, you know, Steve Pei at Gratia, you know, Craig and Mike Kaufman, the interest that was taken in the company was very, very high, including site visits, including reviews, and tours, you know, of all of our assets and quite frankly, an extremely constructive engagement about, you know, support and help for how do we position this company to be a truly global, truly dominant, you know, metal recycling company. I think that reflects, you know, 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.

You know, if you go back to the shareholder letter from last January, it was a tough letter, but the message was, you know, we need to clean things up. We need to get recapitalized, and we need to fund these growth businesses. If people go back and look at that letter, we could say, "Wow, we made huge progress." Now we have that posture, so the hard work is now the execution. How do you take a platform that’s regional? Sure, half of the end-of-life market is in the Southwest region, you know, of the United States. Absolutely, Nevada and these Nevada permits and platform positions us to capture it, but it’s much bigger than that. You know, the United States has over 1.3 billion panels deployed.

They’re coming end of life rapidly, and that’s only one-eighth of the world. You know, the world has just as big of a dilemma, you know, 8X relative to the U.S. The conversation was around, you know, expanding governance, you know, expanding international business competency, accessing capital markets competency. We’re thrilled to announce, you know, the addition of 3 new independent directors. You know, Donald Colvin, who has extensive and frankly complex, you know, 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. You know, and just the global public company governance posture, you know, from chairing boards to chairing audit committees.

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

I think, you know, from a perspective of really strong platform that can really handle all of the things that are coming. You know, sweeping across, you know, the U.S., we’ve got a really good plan for that, but this won’t stop there. You know, this market is just extraordinary. We’re welcoming, you know, of our expanded board, and I guess the final takeaway is, you know, when two of your top four investors, you know, are represented on your board, that screams a lot. You know, we couldn’t be more thankful to Steve Pei, Radia, Michael A. Kaufman at MAK, Craig and the rest of the team that just, you know, worked so diligently to make all this happen for us. We thank you very much.

For 2026, that team, that governance structure, that capital base is aligned, right? We’re aligned on these objectives, which is very much first and foremost to monetize our non-core legacy mining assets. We’ve gone from a few years ago, you know, talking to, you know, less than credible people, to talking to, you know, marginally capable people, to now being engaged with very serious, you know, mining counterparties that absolutely, you know, like what we have here, what we’ve maintained here, which is, you know, a great mining district, great resources. If there’s any question about this decision, let me put everybody’s mind at rest. You know, every dollar, you know, that we take from the mining assets and put into the recycling assets multiplies exponentially. Let’s be clear.

If we were gonna 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. In that context, it’s money that doesn’t go to solar recycling. That’s a non-starter for us. It never was a starter for us, frankly. Every dollar that we can then pull out of that non-productive 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, you know, have about 2.5 million ounces of silver in situ just in the Dayton resource alone.

Yeah, that would take 6 or 7 years to mine, you know, once the mine got up and running. Two 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. You can see the difference in throughput in cash generation from what you could call two different silver mines. We also wanna monetize our non-core legacy real estate. I’m gonna give you more transparency on that today simply because we finally came to sufficient progress both, you know, with Sierra Springs’s 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 gonna monetize here, hopefully will be, pleasantly, higher than anyone might have been expecting. We’re gonna do both of those things. Green Li-ion, we also wanna monetize. It’s less within our control. The company’s making extraordinary progress, truly exceeded my expectations in terms of their journey to profitability. They have operating facility in Oklahoma. We own 13% of the company. They’ve announced that they’re going to move into a public listing in Australia sometime later this year. Once Green Li-ion is successful in its endeavor to becoming a public company, then we’ll have a much easier and clearer, you know, exit strategy for that investment. We’ve worked very, very hard on all these monetization items.

This is the crux of the corporate objectives. You know, 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. 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?

We’re on the verge of something very meaningful here. I think 2026, credibly now, we’ll see monetization of mining, monetization of non-core real estate, and frankly, timing couldn’t be better. You know? We’re really all about supporting the exponential growth of the metals business, not just for national dominance, really for setting the global standard, you know, in this recycling business. We crushed it in 2025, 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.

Now with hindsight, it looks like it would be very difficult for any existing competitor that we know of to even set foot in Nevada and even get permits, you know, within 2 years. 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 what we’ve positioned here. We don’t wanna stop in the Southwest region ’cause that’s only half the market. We wanna get to the rest of the U.S., and that will come, as Judd said, you know, 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. 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, you know, test up to a demo, which we hope to have here by the end of this year. All that, you know, all that work in 2025 really positioned us, you know, to move fast, right? What do we wanna do? We wanna get this facility up and running. Substantially all of the equipment has arrived. The ovens are arriving now, and the ovens literally represent 20 full, you know, eighteen-wheelers. I just looked at the final truck schedules.

You start to get a sense of the magnitude, you know, of this process and the system. Some of you have come and visited, you know, and I’ll show some pictures of some of the equipment as it’s getting assembled here. It’s all coming in. You know, we’re on schedule. It wouldn’t be right to say that, you know, three or four weeks of slippage hasn’t occurred, but that was already buffered in our schedule. Commissioning in Q1, operating in Q2 holds. We’re very happy about that, bringing the thing online. 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, you know, take a knee or move aside. Really, that’s an analogy to say that, our customers, you know, the true utility scale companies, you know, 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 two or three people that, we previously talked about as showing up most often. There’s a really good trend there. Something even more strategic is happening. Some of these institutions are either 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, you know, on one of the sites or venturing into a third or fourth site. This all ties to getting market share, right? We want to dominate the market share. We’re very happy with how those underlying, you know, conversations are going. We’ve identified the second site. We’re pinning it down, final stages. The permits actually have already been submitted. You know, so we’re excited about it. It will be in Clark County. It will be just outside of Las Vegas, you know, exactly where we wanted to position the second site, you know, for this Southwest region. California’s permitted up and running. Ohio’s 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. That side of things is moving very, very quickly, and we’re continuing, you know, all of those efforts. Twenty-six is gonna be, you know, as foundational as twenty-five was. Twenty-six is gonna show the light. You know, twenty-six is gonna show the large industrial system running. It’s gonna show it turning profitable. It’s gonna show volumes increasing, and you’re gonna see revenue go from, you know, $100,000 a month to $200,000 a month to $1 million a month to $2 million a month. You know, that’s our profile for 2026.

We don’t see any reason why that isn’t going to come together just like that. We don’t need to talk that much about, you know, 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. You know, even with some pullback, we’re sitting at $70 silver, which is above anything that we’ve modeled, you know, in our process. As I mentioned previously, even at $60 silver, you know, our offtake revenue isn’t $125 a ton. It’s $375 a ton. You know, we already have an enhanced profile, you know, given the current realities. You see the inside of 600 Lake Avenue in this picture. That was 7 months ago.

You know, now when you look at the inside of 600 Lake Avenue, you know, 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, you know, of the large system. You can’t see the ends of the footprint. It’s extremely large, 80, 90, 100 feet, you know, of processing, fully integrated, fully automated. We are testing the robotic arms. We are assembling the front-end crushers. We are pulling together, you know, all of the equipment. We’re heavily finalizing the grading and the preparation, fencing is gonna go up next week for the storage. 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, you know, sits, okay? You know, 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 four 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." If you’re on Twitter or X, you can see some even more elaborate pictures of this development. It’s happening, you know, real-time.

The holy grail, you know, is not, you know, 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, you know, and depending on the types of panel, leaving the gallium or the tellurium or the indium behind. You know, 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, you know, from the tailings. We, 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. It’s been exceptional that the team has made and forced the capacity and to design this refining solution. You know, 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 wanna expand it. We want to assume we’re one day ahead. We don’t wanna assume we’re two years ahead. We’re talking about recycling. We’re not talking about refining. We don’t see anybody even talking about these types of refining solutions, you know. The reason this is so important, and I think the reason, you know, our capital base is so interested is, you know, 3.5 million panels last year would load one of our production lines.

In 4 years, that number is gonna be 33 million. You know, we would need 10 production lines, you know, to do that. 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. 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. If this Southwest region does anything close to what we think it’s gonna do, it’s doubling the capacity, 2.5x-ing the capacity of that facility will have literally zero permitting lead time. Zero permitting lead time. It’s already permitted.

What it will require, of course, is you know, equipment ordering lead time, which we can let the market tell us, you know, when to trigger, you know, that. This is the old map that most of you have seen, but for any of you that haven’t, you know, 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 two facilities in Nevada are so critical and why we’re going after this half of the market, you know, so diligently, so vigorously. At an enhanced metal value, you know, you’re not talking about, you know, $55 million-$60 million of cash flow from one facility running full.

You’re talking about $75 million-$80 million, you know, for one facility running full. 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 non-core assets. You know, some of you may have seen previously, you know, a higher NPV that we calculated for our mining assets. That number was correct. It stays correct. 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, you know? They have capital.

They have capital to deploy, and we’re talking about a range of value of, you know, let’s say $50 million-$60 million. We’re not necessarily talking about all cash up front, 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, you know, relevant or meaningful milestones. You know, any dollar that we pull out of non-productive 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, you know, into ownership at extraordinary values. I’m gonna talk about that a little bit more. I’m gonna give you a little bit more color.

I’ve been busy with this because it’s super active. All right. Nevada went through a monstrous, you know, 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. It’s every big name. We have an industrial park very, very close to us, not the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center. 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’s tapped out. The grid’s not available until God knows when. We secured similarly access to that power. It required some small financial commitment initially, you know, a small bond, $1.5 million of posting, which was easy.

It opened up the whole world for us. You know, now we’ve got. I’ll be very frank, like I’m behind, you know, in being responsive to them. If that’s annoying to you, it should be because it’s annoying to me. The dollars that we’re talking about are not $45 million or $50 million like we talked about before. It’s $200 million, and that doesn’t include our properties that we own 100% and directly. As you can see, it’s in everybody’s interest for us to prioritize and monetize, you know, these assets. The mining assets, you know, last year we acquired the Haywood Quarry. You see it right here, you know, this Haywood target on the map.

We also sold some of the northern properties, which are now taken off of this map. In selling those northern properties, you know, we also got. You know, 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 got those 230 acres at no additional consideration. 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 saleable, much more monetizable, you know. As I said earlier, we’re fully engaged. You know, 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." I just want to make it clear, that’s exactly, you know, what those moves were designed to position us for. These properties, they’re flat, they’re expansive, and they’re very attractive to real miners, you know. We’re really having productive conversations. Judd’s getting very close, and I really appreciate that help and 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. Of course, Comstock needs to benefit dramatically, you know, from that capacity.

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, one 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 the environmental climate is almost perfect for optimal cooling of these data centers. It’s even more than that. Northern Nevada is literally one of the safest places in the country when it comes to the hazard map or the disaster avoidance map.

You know, we don’t have hurricanes, we don’t have hailstorms, we don’t have all of these impediments. It’s no coincidence that Google, Apple, Microsoft, Switch, Tract, you know, and then at least two dozen more are locating here, you know, for mega hyper scaling. For us, it was when USA Parkway was built, you know, from a nonexistent road to a dirt road to a four-lane superhighway connecting Reno right down into Silver Springs, where, you know, my better lucky than good comment keeps coming out. You know, we were sitting right there, you know, ready to receive that ball. You know, it was still somewhat pioneering two years ago. You know, everything was happening in the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center. Everything was happening up in Fernley, and people kept saying, "Well, what about Silver Springs?

What about Silver Springs?" Well, you know, if you look at the map this way, you see this connecting highway. Tesla’s Gigafactory 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 Lode here, just, you know, 30 minutes down the road of Highway 50, and then you see the congregation of this asset here. I haven’t spoken about this much because we spend, you know, Fortunato and the team spend 110% of their time on Comstock metals. You know, I like to think I spend 50% of my time supporting Comstock metals. I want that to be 90% of my time. You know, Jud’s handling the monetization of the mining assets, I’m handling the monetization of Sierra Springs.

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 gonna 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 gonna see with hopefully some foresight, but certainly soon with hindsight is that LODE investors own something very, very valuable here. As exciting as monetizing something that’s worth $200 million potentially would be, what can be done with that money in solar recycling is a whole ’nother level of excitement.

You can read up all the articles about what’s happening in northern Nevada. It’s very easy to see them. 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. You know, Tahoe Reno Industrial Center was at $2-$4 per sq ft. You know, then it was $4-$5 per sq ft. Then it was $6-$8 per sq ft. Then Microsoft lands and starts, you know, pushing $10 per sq ft. Those are incredible numbers. If we’re even close to those types of numbers, my numbers will be understated.

When Tract’s 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 Piru Shelf right up here by Switch to right across the street from our properties in Silver Springs. There’s three major developments that they’re breaking ground on right now. If you don’t understand it or if you’d like to see it’ll only take you 20 minutes from Reno to see monster Tract platforms being built and positioned. That only enhances the value, like of everything in this area. If you look at this map, you know, the airport being the blue center, everything else in color around us, you know, is part of our portfolio that I wanna monetize for us, except the top of number 11 here.

That’s where Microsoft came in, and then right alongside of it, Tract is coming in. You go from literally being out in the middle of nowhere on, you know, the loneliest highway in America to USA Parkway plugging into us to Tract and Microsoft coming in across the street.

I mean, it’s extraordinarily exciting, but none of it would mean anything if the Great Basin Gas Transmission Company didn’t show up four months ago and say, "We’re gonna spend a couple billion dollars, and we’re gonna expand gas into this area, into Fernley, into TRIC, literally right into Silver Springs." If they didn’t come out and say that, we’d still be talking about, you know, "Why the hell can’t we sell these properties?" But with that power commitment, the game has changed dramatically, and we’re gonna see something, you know, really exciting happen. Took a little bit longer than I was expecting, I apologize, but Zach, please let’s just jump into Q&A.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: 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. Corrado, you did touch on a lot of these questions that we have, so perhaps you can just provide a little more color. Now pardon me if I do repeat.

Corrado De Gasperis, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: No worries. Just go ahead, Zach.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: Any questions?

Corrado De Gasperis, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: Go ahead.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: 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, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: Yeah. I think right now, in fairness, Judd’s spending. You know, obviously you can see the time we spent, you know, from a corporate perspective, on recapitalizing and funding and now, you know, over the last month or so on governance. That’s really positive and took a little bit more of our time, you know, critically constructive and needed. I think probably I will spend 40%-50% of my time, and I expect Judd the same, on monetizing these non-core assets, okay? It’s a priority, and thank God, you know, 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.

I do feel like if we were, you know, directly, you know, just a solar panel recycling company, just a metal company, we would go from having a strong, capable, sufficient management team, to overwhelming force, you know. I think ultimately we’d like to see, you know, 80% metals, 20% corporate. That’ll only happen once we monetize the assets. 50% metals, 50% corporate, you know, that 50% is heavily dedicated to, you know, monetizing these assets and the things you know, the prerequisites needed to monetize those assets.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: 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, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: That’s one of the most major fronts of our efforts. We’re signing master service agreements all the time right now. We’ve signed a couple extraordinary ones with e-recyclers, you know, the folks that have already established recycling businesses. That’s about 10%-15% of the market. We generally think about the major utilities as being 80% of the market. What’s happening right now is we’re signing up. You know, I can’t think of a major utility that we’ve had a setback on, you know. That includes, you know, NextEra, Florida Power and Light. Everyone’s pretty familiar with RWE, NV Energy, which is a Berkshire Hathaway, you know, a Berkshire energy company, Brookfield. You know, Edison.

I mean, we’re really making hay with signing these folks up, right? The second point is, you know, 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, you know, in the country, right? So those are the people we want to engage. We’ve also signed up, you know, our first actual solar manufacturing company, you know, which I was talking to Don about this, you know, as we were going through the board process. You know, the solar manufacturers are not really our customers. You know, they do have some amount of breakage and waste, so they’re a steady eddy. They ship us a truck or two a week.

They’re a very, very small part of the end-of-life market, of course. They’re the beginning of life market. They also point us to their customers, and they also integrate us with their returns. That’s all coming along. To answer your question, locking in the customer is the most critical prerequisite. You know, 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. We’ve been doing that steadily for the last two years. As I think I mentioned earlier, there is a breakthrough too. There’s a number of customers who, you know, their attitude is, "Well, you’re certified, you’re qualified, you’re wonderful.

When the big machine’s up and running, you know, we’ll start sending more panels because we want our certificate of destruction pretty rapidly. Okay? The profile should be $200,000 a month to half a million dollars a month to $1 million a month to $2 million a month. $2 million a month is a $24 million-$25 million run rate of revenue. That will be remarkably profitable, you know, and then we just grow it from there. We still believe that by the end of 2027, facility number one will be running full. Facility number two should be in the 20%-30% capacity utilization range. Those are really rough estimates, right? Because we don’t see a smooth linear up project progression here.

We see a lot of spiking. We see a lot of deferred maintenance. We see a lot of deferred recycling, you know. Once we click in, you know, 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, you know, 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? It’s finally coming through. You know, what I mean to say is we’re having very meaningful discussions now, very meaningful outcomes this year.

You know, in terms of what specifically that will mean, right, to forward volumes. It’s coming, right? It’s just slower than anyone would ever hope, but setting the foundation is the critical thing. One of the ways I’ve described this to people is if our business this year, you know, 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 gonna see a 10X increase in their end of life. They may even be higher because they’re gonna lead that increase in end of life. You know, the 3.5 million from last year to 33 million in 2030. We’re positioning for great, you know, almost organic growth.

It’s kind of a perverse or backwards way of thinking about it. 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.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: 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, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: I think we received all of our equipment and started to receive the components for the oven. I just mentioned it earlier. I just looked at the shipping schedules for the ovens. It’s literally like 20 monster eighteen-wheel, you know, truckload containers. Like, I was surprised at the magnitude of the logistics, right, to get those ovens to us. Those are starting, you know. The schedule says they start coming next week. They stop coming within, you know, 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, you know, in terms of what you know, what needs to be installed and tested and then processed. In that regard, you know, we feel, you know, again, maybe 3 or 4 weeks of slippage, that was fully buffered in our plans, right? We’ll be up and running in Q2, and I think that’s gonna be a huge milestone. Huge milestone.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: Speaking of sequence, please review the timetable for the second recycling project.

Corrado De Gasperis, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: So-

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: Its initial revenue and probable location.

Corrado De Gasperis, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: Yeah. Yep. It’s gonna 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, you know, frankly. We have a site, we’re in final stages of locking down the terms. We’ve already submitted the permit ’cause we know where the site is. You know, I think the question is, when do we order the equipment? You know, last time I asked Fortunato, he said, as soon as we possibly can because the equipment lead times when we first. You know, we raised the money in August, we ordered the equipment the next day. We were looking at a 5-6 month lead time. It turned out to be 7-8. Okay?

If 7-8 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 wanna order the equipment, you know, sooner rather than later. If you’re ordering equipment in May, you could have it arriving in December. The process should look and feel, you know, maybe 3 months faster, you know, from a calendar perspective than the first facility, or it could mirror it very closely, right? Commissioning in Q1, operating in Q2. I’d love to see commissioning in Q4, operating in Q1. As soon as we order the equipment, we’ll be able to communicate that.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: Okay. Sticking with Comstock Metals, you’ve outlined a seven-facility national model with a central refinery hub. What is the capital requirement per facility at the scale you’re targeting?

Corrado De Gasperis, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: We’ve always said, you know, recycling facility, 12-15, okay? You know, 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 the facility number 1. If we had to buy a facility, you might have to put a deposit down, it might be 15, you know, maybe 16 at the most. It’s a nice tight range. It’s not a lot. $12 million-$15 million we’ll stick with. Maybe 13-16 is buffered. That’s a good number. That’s for each facility. As you heard earlier, you know, $75 million plus in cash flow when they’re running full. That profile is beautiful. The central refinery, though, is still conceptual. Like, we are certainly not going to build, you know, seven refineries.

You know, ideally, there could be one, maybe very centrally located. The math on that is if a recycling facility is taking in 100,000 tons, and 10%-15% are tailings, you’re gonna 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 size refining operation. You could start with one in Nevada, and that would be. You know, if you did that, you’d probably either have one big one there, or you might have one on the West Coast, you know, Nevada-based, one on the East Coast, then you’d have two. We don’t know the answer to that yet.

We still need to get the FID on the engineering, but we’re projecting the capital for one large refining operation like that 100,000-ton intake level to be about $30 million, right? 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, no, not in our scenario. You know, we’re a very precise, very fine industrial tailoring, so that’s more what we’re looking like. I hope that answers the question.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: Grotto pivoting to SSLF.

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

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: The values sound high.

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

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: What are the prerequisites for monetizing these assets, and what’s the timeline?

Corrado De Gasperis, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: Yep. I think, look, there’s probably five prerequisites. Let’s just think them through. Industrially zoned land, check. Flat, you know, developable land, super check. Water rights, check. Fiber, check. Electricity, right? That’s the fifth one is where, you know, we sort of hit the wall. If I could give people context, right? The Great Basin Gas Transmission Company came out with an open bid. This is a FERC-regulated utility bid. We committed to, like, 50,000 decatherms a day. I think they got bids for 800,000 decatherms. You know, if our number’s 300 MW, you know, their number is 15 times that, 13 times that, you know. 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.

What we need to do is close out on the land position. There’s still some capital, you know, required to do that. Close out on the land position, have clean title, clean and final environmental reports. We had already done phase one previously super clean, so no issues. 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, you know, there was a phase of all-electric cooling, then the grids ran out of electricity. Now everybody’s hell-bent on, you know, the technologies that reduce, you know, water in data cooling, but you gotta have water rights, right?

If we do those three 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. You know, that timing would be perfect. Data room would open up and then, you know, 60- to 90-day process. You know, we’re absolutely looking at 2026. You know, getting this done in 2026.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: Thank you, Corrado. We do have a question on Bioleum management. Please provide an update on the Bioleum team.

Corrado De Gasperis, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: Absolutely. I think most people appreciate that in March of last year, you know, Marathon Petroleum invested directly into what was previously known as Comstock Fuels. In May, a large investor came in with another direct investment. It was 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’d say 10 people. You know, David Winsness, you know, Rahul Bobbili. But there’s a strong group of founders there, but there’s an even bigger group. There’s probably 40 professionals.

You know, let me just say this, their whole claim to fame, you know, their equivalent of Fortunato’s zero landfill, highly efficient, thermal solution is their ability to unlock lignin in woody biomass. We call it lignocellulosic technology. That company’s roster includes like Dr. Christian Dahlström from Sweden, Dr. Marcus Juulthree from Sweden, Dr. Colin Anson from Madison, Jordan Thott from Wausau, Dr. Elvis Akpobi from New York, originally from Nigeria, Dana Hatch, Bob Rizmirik, Andrew Held. These are all chemists and chemical engineers. Then you have Dr. Greg Beckham at the National Laboratory of the Rockies, previously known as NREL, Dr. Yuriy Román-Leshkov at MIT. Like, you’re literally talking about the top 10 lignocellulosic professionals, like, in the world, you know?

What they’re coming out with here is the highest yielding, lowest carbon ability to take waste into low carbon fuels. You know, people probably feel. 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. As you hear me talk about monetizing assets, you know, I don’t.

I’m happy to be supportive, I’m happy to be helpful, and I am intimate, you know, with what they’re doing. Their success will be our success, right? We wanna put our calories into growing a literally international dominant, you know, metal recycling business.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: 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, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: 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 almost immediate access to capital. Like, we’re not talking about people who are blue skying possibilities here. You know, the people that we’re talking to have done quite a bit of diligence, like I would say tremendous amount. You know, just from a legal, administrative, final processes, you’re probably looking at 75-90 days. Is it guaranteed? Could something bust? For sure. We’re feeling pretty good about it.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: 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, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: No. I would like to repeat, though, what I had said earlier. You know, we had, you know, 7 or 8 years of excruciatingly poor access to the capital markets, you know, bad structures, bad efforts, probably with hindsight, you know, using a junior mining penny stock structure to capitalize too high growth innovative technologies was not the smartest thing in the world. 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 gonna profit, you know, 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. Just in case anybody is curious, like, we hated it. We did get this business launched, you know, and we’re running now. What’s more important is we have capital partners. We have capitalized and funded, and I think if we had no non-core assets, the positive of that would be that we would be more fully dedicated to metals.

You know, the positive of having them is, as I said earlier, if we monetize those assets and redeploy them, then we, you know, we have a bonanza on our hands here. We are de-risked from distraction. We are de-risked from having to slow down. You know, 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. You know. We’re just gonna keep flying forward and we don’t see any reason looking forward, right, that we would have to raise money. If something unknown happened, then we could talk about it, but, like, we don’t see it.

Unequivocal no.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: 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 @ComstockInc. Please follow us. Corrado, before we wrap up, please give us some final thoughts for the final week of Q one-

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

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: the rest of 2026.

Corrado De Gasperis, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: Yeah. I’m super excited about our new, you know, board members. They’ve already, you know, reached out wanting to, you know, start engaging and coming back out to visit. I’m super excited about, you know, the work leading up to the annual meeting, you know, in May. I think that if you can come to the meeting in person, we’re gonna take a bus down to Silver Springs, you know, and on the way to Silver Springs, we’ll go through the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, and you’ll see about 10 million sq ft under construction, you know, on the way to it.

It’s probably relevant to point out that 600 Lake Avenue, you know, this incredibly ideal location for solar panel recycling, and 800 Lake Avenue, the monstrous, like, storage facility right next door are Sierra Springs properties. You know? You know, 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, you know, for customer announcements. Stay tuned. We’ll be more active next week, the week after, and the week after with pictures of the ovens, the assemblies, the commissioning, and then just panels starting to go through the machine.

We’re really at the inflection point here of 3.5-4 years of incredibly hard work. Pretty exciting.

Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations, Comstock Inc.: 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, Chief Executive Officer, Comstock Inc.: Thank you all.