Welcome everyone to Noble Capital Markets Basic Industries Virtual Equity Conference, and thank you for joining us today. I am Mark Reichman, a senior research analyst at Noble. It is my pleasure to introduce Mr. Corrado De Gasperis, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Comstock Inc. Comstock commercializes technologies that enable systemic decarbonization and accelerate the energy transition by efficiently converting underutilized natural resources into renewable energy products, and by leveraging physics-based artificial intelligence for more efficient and effective mineral and materials discovery. Comstock shares are listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LODE. Welcome, Corrado. Oh, it's a pleasure to be here, Mark. Thank you for having me. Corrado, I wanted to start just by asking you if you would please provide a thumbnail sketch of the company. Surely. So Comstock Inc. is, we operate as one system. However, the system has a few parts, right? We have fully owned subsidiary called Comstock Fuels, fully owned subsidiary called Comstock Metals, which is our metal recycling, renewable metals business, and Comstock Mining, sustainable mining business. We also have a corporate platform, which really has two engines to it. You know, one engine is we support these businesses so that they do not have to worry about some of the corporate tasks or corporate matters, you know, like, you know, SEC reporting, capital raising, those kinds of things. They're really focused on commercializing their technologies as fast as possible to the business. And then secondly, we have a central innovation capacity. We call it Comstock Innovations. For most intents and purposes, it's been the technology engine that supports the business's development of technology, but it has other technologies that are also being developed. So a very systemic enterprise. Our mission is to enable systemic decarbonization, and we do it through the acceleration of these technologies through these lines of businesses. Now, what was the impetus for deciding to evolve the company from being predominantly a mining concern to a much more diversified entity with decarbonization and sustainability at the forefront of its strategies? It's a great question. You know, so we for over a decade, right, we were essentially, you know, a large silver and gold mining district. We were a junior miner, for lack of a better definition, but we also were always leaders in environmental stewardship. You know, Two of the first three years that we were mining, we won the state's top Environmental Reclamation Excellence Awards, and that's saying something when you consider that Nevada is the number one jurisdiction in the world for mining. And our, you know, we're not peers with the Barricks, Newmonts, Kinrosses of the world, but those are the folks that are getting these kind of recognitions, so to be up there with them in environmental stewardship, and safety for that matter, was quite rewarding. But also my background started with a company called GrafTech, where we were the largest material science-based renewable company, or let's call it renewable supply chain. 'Cause we took petroleum coke from the oil and gas refining process, we converted it to synthetic graphite. We used those graphite to make electrodes that recycled scrap steel in an electric arc furnace. So that supply chain was the largest recycling supply chain in the world. Plus, we had this environmental and social license for the good stewardship that we had demonstrated, so it actually felt like a logical evolution to take that platform, and frankly, the core competencies that we have, you know, be it environmental, be it regulatory, be it renewing metals, renewing minerals, metallurgical even, if you will, and evolve that. You know, first into metal recycling, and then also into renewable fuels. Would you please talk about the impressive team you've assembled to direct and execute the activities of the company and its subsidiaries? Yeah. You know, it's funny because when I think about maybe when I was a younger man, right, my number one favorite word was throughput. You know, I was, and I frankly still am, obsessed, right, with the speed that the system works and the speed that the system generates, you know, units of the goal. You know, be it, you know, cash per hour or decarbonization or otherwise. And so, you know, that's part of our DNA. But as I grew older, I guess, got some gray hairs, you know, around my ears and stuff, and started to take on broader responsibilities, frankly, the word alignment was you know, moved into the pole position, right? So, you know, segueing that to the question about our team, you know, to meet a group of people like Dr. Fortunato Villamagna, right, who spent his whole career on renewing and recycling hazardous materials for productive use, or protecting the environment with renewable technologies, or, you know, Kevin Kreisler, David Winsness, you know, the RenFuel team, who've dedicated decades to decarbonization and new technologies. We first almost immediately had philosophical alignment. Like, we really wanna do something that's purposeful and impactful. Secondly, there's operational alignment. We wanna do it systemically, we wanna do it as a team. You know, we wanna de-bottleneck industries, right? We focus on what's the biggest problem in the industry. And then for that team, typically, when you think systemically, when you like to work interdependently with others, you really want subject matter experts, you know? So, the alignment and the forging of alignment with this team, philosophically, they wanna make impact, right? Operationally, they wanna work together as one team to make big impact. Yet, they're the best in their field. Right. You know, so it's probably the most important thing, Mark, in us deciding, you know, we're gonna make a bet on renewable fuels, or we're gonna make a bet on renewable metals, or in the future, you know, on hydrogen or something else. That alignment of the team and its core competency, its subject matter expertise, we have to work with experts, but if they're aligned on that common goal, things get easier, you know, and our success moves faster. And so I think the answer to the question, the direct answer is, by having that common view, we're very much attracted to each other, right? And it sticks. It sticks, so... Now, before we get into greater depth at the subsidiary level, it might be helpful to summarize the recently announced transaction with SBC Commerce and its implications for accelerating the company's growth. Absolutely. Would you mind if I said one more thing? Oh, sure. I'd just like to maybe conclude, when it comes to the team and it comes to the thinking of, you know, systemic thinking of building that team, we've now started to transcend, you know, even the borders of our enterprise, right? In other words, you can think of the enterprise as a system. We certainly do. But then, as we get an alliance with a company like RenFuel, that has, you know, literally global leading IP and intellectual horsepower in their people- Mm-hmm ... with classic technologies and taking lignin to oil or wood to fuel, and then you add, you know, another development partner, you know, at another university, and then you add maybe, you know, a national lab. Like, you start adding, you know, to the equation, our team actually broadens beyond our borders. I think what you're gonna hear us talking about over the next couple of months is literally a world-class innovation team that what is kind of remarkable in the fuels context is, we believe we're the global leader today, yet we're putting a team together to push the envelope, you know, beyond what people even think is possible, so- Well, and you're building a lot of symbiotic relationships outside of Comstock. Exactly, right. Very strong nodes, right? Very strong connections that we think of them are building, you know, platform, you know, for many decades. Yeah, I'm happy to go into greater detail. I mean, you know, fundamentally, what's happened, you know, frankly, over the last four years, you know, and especially over the last 18 months, is moving these technologies to a state of readiness and then a state of scalability proven, you know, with physical assets, with demonstration facilities, with pilot systems, where we could then build a credible, supportable, institutional model of our business plan. So build out that plan, build out the financial plan that supports it. So you get to full technical and economic feasibility, supportable, credible, demonstrable. What we did is we went into the market with those plans and, you know, frankly, in the equity markets, you know, it's a little bit of a harder sell, you know, at the level of maturity that we were at. But when we started engaging private capital, and we could support what we were showing in those business plans and in those models, and what were we showing? In the business of Comstock Metals Recycling, we were showing that a little over $20 million of committed equity would allow us to build three facilities and attain sustainable profitability. With $50 million for Comstock Mining, we could put a mine into production that had well over $250 million of free cash flow. And then with fuels, $150 million for our first demonstration facility and another $50 million to accelerate and forge forward both the innovations that are coming and the capacity that we need to support that commercialization. And we found a partner in SBC that we want to literally, individually, independently into each line of business, into each wholly owned subsidiary, if you will, right? Creating a capital partner, while we still control each subsidiary, we realize, we recognize a higher valuation for the work that we've done to date, and that's important, of course. But I think what's more important is enabling the value. This capital is the precise amount that we believe gets us commercial and sustainably profitable, and then the growth profile from there is tremendous. When do you anticipate reaching definitive agreements? Yeah. So we're working with them daily. They're very engaged, and what we're doing right now is we're making sure that, you know, the entity structure, you know, the tax efficiency, all of the things that go along with essentially taking a wholly owned subsidiary and making it a little bit more standalone, a little bit more independent in most other ways, including some governance, right? Including some tax planning and efficiencies. And so we expect over the next couple of months, right? And it won't - we don't see that it's gonna be, "Okay, on this day, it's all done." We're- Right ... certain, see, "Oh, here comes the first deposit. Oh, here comes the first investment, probably into metals. Oh, here comes the second investment," and it'll be- Right ... staggered. And it's not staggered for convenience. It's literally each one of them has a slightly different series of prerequisites, right? With fuels probably having the most and metals having the least, right, in that context. So, over the next few months, certainly, we would say throughout the fourth quarter, you know, we would like to see these things happening. Now, yesterday, Comstock Fuels announced its first international licensing agreement with SACL Pte. Ltd. Perhaps it might be best to start with what Comstock Fuels has accomplished from a technical perspective, and then what this agreement means for the company commercially. Yes, so we're excited to announce SACL's transaction. We had been working with them for a number of months, and what we were highly impressed by was that they had already identified three sites. They have already identified and quantified the feedstocks, which is absolutely critical to site selection for those sites. They've identified certain partners for those feedstocks, and they have a deep bench of chemical engineering and engineering, you know, capacity. So quite credible in our minds in terms of someone able to, you know, deploy our technology, you know, in that jurisdiction, and then continue to do so. What was great was there was a strong recognition. You know, these are folks that have probably spent close to two decades in, you know, biofuel fuels and renewable fuels. So, you know, people who've been in and out of the industry, you know, basically, they know what doesn't work. You know? And so, you know, they were attracted to us, you know, by our yields, when we were communicating a hundred gasoline- Mm ... per dry ton of wood. That number has moved up to 125 gasoline gallon equivalents per ton of wood, and they also understand the developments that are continuing from there. But just at those levels, you know, the economic feasibility, and so we were able to structure a really, really collaborative license with, you know, 6% royalties on the large facilities, 6% fees associated with engineering tied to the capital cost of those facilities, in addition to the ongoing royalty, and then also a 20% equity stake, right? And that, that was a very amicable negotiation because a lot of it is all about collaboration, and we wanted to make sure that they were gonna be successful. So we want to commit the capacity. So those engineering fees, for example, is a demonstration on both sides that we must commit the capacity to ensure that they get up and running successfully, you know? And so, we're excited about it because, frankly, Australia and New Zealand, you know, wasn't really on any priority radar screen for us. We're North and South American prioritized, you know, in terms of the wood baskets and it's additive to a number of U.S.-based discussions that are continuing as we speak. Now, Comstock Fuels is planning to build, own, and operate its first four facilities in the United States. Could you just maybe elaborate on the timing, and how many facilities do you think the market could bear, over time? That's a great question. Like, so, first and foremost, we are urgently vetting and assessing, you know, site number one, and site number one will be demonstration scale, which, you know, coincidentally, like Comstock Metals, is big enough to be profitable, big enough to vet out everything before we go full industry scale, you know, and so we're vetting the first locales for that. Feedstock is a critical prerequisite to that, and the beauty is there's numerous choices, and so we would like to, as quickly as possible, decide on the first site, announce the first site, announce the feedstock and feedstock agreements associated with the first site, and announce the offtake agreements associated with the first site. That's very, very vigorous, you know. Then, the next three sites, we would be, you know, like SACL, looking at up to a million tons, you know, per a facility. And to answer your question, you know, even at a hundred GGEs, one million ton facility is a hundred million gallons, okay? So the mandate in the U.S. is, like, sixteen billion gallons, right? So you can be talking 150, 160 facilities. Now, as we get higher yields, a hundred and twenty-five, right, you know, maybe some carbon capture and conversion technology gets us closer to a hundred and fifty, then maybe it's a hundred and twenty facilities. But it's big, right? It's big, you know. You know, the first site is important for so many different reasons, but ideally, it would be a jurisdiction where you could build a dozen of the facilities based on the feedstocks, you know, in the proximities. That's what we're assessing right now. Now, Comstock Metals has been rapidly commercializing its solar panel recycling business, and now offers end-to-end solar panel recycling solutions to potential customers. Would you please update us on kind of recent developments, the company's plans, and the economics of that business? ... Absolutely. So we have our demonstration facility fully up and running. We've announced that we're moving from one shift to three shifts. We now have permission to go twenty four/seven, so we're very excited about that. That's news. And we've proven that we can receive panels, you know, and we talk about an average of, like, $500 a ton, you know, coming in the door, you know, with a cost of less than $100 a ton to process those out into resalable materials. So that's amazing, 'cause that's, like, an 80% margin. We never really modeled initially the value of reselling those materials. We first had to prove to ourselves we could provide resalable materials like, you know, you know, clean aluminum, clean glass, and, you know, these silver or solar tailings that are rich in silver. You know, and so we just announced a few weeks ago that we sent our first aluminum shipment out the door. We're getting ready to send our first glass shipment out the door, you know? And so with the aluminum announcement, you know, $0.60 a pound is equivalent to, like, almost $150 a ton of additional revenue, so it's quite profitable. So we're excited about that. The permits are being prepared and the engineering is being finalized for the industry scale, which then takes you from you know proving you know beyond any reasonable doubt that all of this works well, which we've done, to then scaling it up to you know not doing you know two tons a shift or six tons a day, but 15-20 tons an hour. You know, that's what industry scale looks like, and industry scale translates to you know 3.3-3.5 million panels a year, or about 100,000 tons you know of material, depending on the nature of those panels. The idea, again, coincidentally similar to fuels, is to build three of those industry scale facilities, one in northern Nevada and two in you know the southern part of Nevada. You know, north of Vegas, south of Vegas. So all the arteries from California, and even the main artery from Arizona coming into our state, are covered for the receipt of these panels, which is where the substantial majority of this market is. And last point I would make is, the substantial majority of this market is in the southwest region of the United States, simply because they were the early adopters of solar panels. As most people know, solar panels are rapidly adopting, you know, across the country. But I'll give you an interesting stat: If we had these three facilities up and running, and we were doing 300,000 tons a year, and the market today is about 100, and it's gonna be 1 million by 2030. So 300,000 is a very practical objective. It's not a stretch goal in our minds, by any measure. But if we were doing 300,000 tons, and we were realizing the silver grades, you know, that we're seeing, you know, even the low end of the range of the silver grades that we're seeing now, we would be, like, in the top two or three silver producers in the state of Nevada. Okay? So this is not insignificant. This is a meaningful business, and we're still just relegated to this southwest corner of the country. It'll ultimately be nationwide, and there's really no reason it couldn't be international, but we wanna walk before we can run. And what are the company's objectives for its mining properties? And how is the collaboration with Quantum Generative Materials going? Oh, very good. So yes, we still have our 12-square-mile, you know, mineral district, the Comstock Lode, and we are very focused on the southern part of the district, where the Dayton Consolidated Mine has a very nice mine plan. You know, when we originally engineered that mine, you know, our gold cutoff was equivalent to $1,800 an ounce. You know, we have increased the price up a bit, maybe to $2,300 in that model, but we hadn't reengineered the model. You know, in other words, there you know. You have nine million tons of ore and 12 million tons of waste, if you use an $1,800 gold equivalent cutoff. That translates to about $250 million of cash flow. And again, that model requires $50 million, you know, in capital to bring the mine fully up and running, hence the SBC commitment of $50 million. But if... You know, I suspect if you increase that cutoff from 1,800 to even 2,300 as a real reengineered mine, the cash flow is gonna go up by at least $100 million, likely $150 million or so, because nine million tons of ore becomes 11 or 12 million tons of ore. You know, that's all economically feasible. You just add to the revenue, and you add to the ounces. I did wanna touch on the value of the company's strategic investments outside of the SBC transaction, namely GenMat, Comstock's investment in the Sierra Springs Opportunity Fund, and the investment in Green Li-ion. So what can investors expect in terms of their ability to favorably impact shareholder value? Yeah. So, starting with GenMat, you know, GenMat is physics-based AI. I mean, truly a remarkable ability to simulate, you know, materials at the atomic level, develop new materials in that manner, and also, similarly, you know, related, being able to identify materials. That's where the geophysics and being able to predict, you know, new mineral discoveries comes into play. We're collaborating with them very, very closely. You know, we're getting to a nice inflection point, right? Where we can start to take some of that functionality capability and start integrating it, you know, even into our own teams, even beyond the collaboration that we're doing with them. We made this investment originally, on a fear-based notion, right? That fear-based notion was that a physics-based AI and material science-based AI is going to be a real thing, then within three, four or five years, you know, the disruption will be so significant, you'll be a dinosaur if you're not adopting these concepts. You know, so that remains our thesis, and we're very, you know, we're very pleased with the progression, and we're at some good inflection points, you know, with GenMat now, 'cause they've achieved certain milestones. With Green Li-ion originally, it was we were coming into electrification recycling, starting with lithium-ion batteries. We didn't like the idea of just going from battery to black mass. We wanted to go all the way to a value-added product. They go from black mass to remanufactured precursor cathode active materials. It's less strategic to us now because of our pivot to solar panels, but we're their biggest supporter and cheerleader, of course, and we would look to monetize that investment. You know, as their first system, which is based in Oklahoma, is now up and running, you know, and should have a nice impact, a positive upward impact on their valuation, and somewhere in and around their next offering, we'll try to monetize our investment there. With the Sierra Springs, it's a real estate-based investment. We have actual real estate that we have a commitment now to sell with SBC for $50 million. Plus, we have the investment in Sierra Springs Opportunity Fund, which could be worth almost the same amount of money, right? We are in a monetization mode, you know, with those assets as well, so hopefully in 2025. Well, with the asset sale, hopefully it'll be coming here in the fourth quarter, as we earlier indicated, you know, and then with Sierra Springs, hopefully soon thereafter or around the same time. So typically we make investments like GenMat, like Green Li-ion, like RenFuel, right, that have a direct implication on our competitiveness, our commercializations, our advancements of our technology. Now, the company has had a lot of announcements lately. What should they be paying attention to, say, over the next couple of months? Yeah. So I think, you know, let's start with metals. You know, we, as you mentioned, we've diversified the offering almost to a full circular loop, right? We realized that a lot of these panels are coming out of the market in many, many different forms. So, you know, objective number one, secure long-term agreements with large solar farms, large utility companies. You're gonna see more of that. That's just simply they package them up, they ship them to us, we get paid to take them and process them. But now we're also offering decommissioning services because there are other intermediate players that just don't have the ability to disassemble these things. It's profitable business, but it's more of a segment that leads us to the most profitable business, which is making sure that we get and maximize the amount of those panels that we're directing to our facilities and away from landfills. So you'll hear more revenue contracts associated with metals, and then you'll also hear submission of permits for industry scale, but hopefully site selection for number two and number three. Let's say over the next four or five months, we should be hearing all of that type of stuff. In the fuels business, starting at the front end of the process, you're gonna hear more partnerships with more technologies. As I said, Comstock's innovations and our innovation system will transcend our company, so and those will be with world-class providers of technology. Either they're the best in their niche, or they're the best, you know, in the broadest sense with lignocellulosic fuels and materials, and those agreements will be coming. You'll also hear site selection and first commercial agreement in the United States, which will complement the first commercial agreement in Australia. You know, so that's coming, you know, fast and furiously. With the mining, I think we're probably more regulated for the time being to finalizing our own, you know, economic feasibility analysis and re-engineering that mine, relative to the much, much higher gold prices. You know, we're pushing $2,600. We're still using an $1,800 cutoff in a very economically feasible situation. So, you know, we'll be updating those, but probably not getting more active in drilling or developing that mine until we close on the SBC capital, you know, for that purpose. No shortage of catalysts. Corrado, thank you so much for joining us today. My pleasure, Mark. It's always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.