Hello everyone, and welcome to the Comstock Fireside Chat. My name is Robert Blum, Managing Partner here at Lytham Partners, and today I'll be moderating a Q&A discussion with Corrado De Gasperis, the Chief Executive Officer at Comstock. Quick reminder, Comstock trades under the ticker symbol LODE on the NYSE American. Corrado, thanks so much for joining us here today. My pleasure, Robert. Always a pleasure to be here. Fantastic. For investors who still associate Comstock mostly with its sort of historical mining roots, how would you describe the company today and why has solar recycling sort of become the center of the story? Yeah, it's been almost a complete transformation. You know, we went from you know, having this, you know, large industrial mining district, gold and silver, to really pausing that activity in 2016 and embarking on, you know, a completely different thesis of business. Still metals-based, but renewable metals. Some people use the term urban mining. But, you know, it's quite remarkable when you think about it, Robert, is that first of all, the world is using, you know, 10% or more of silver going into these photovoltaic, you know, electrification systems. It seems like not just incredibly wasteful but sinful right? To be just disposing of these panels and 10% of our, you know, annual silver supply into landfills. We really moved into a purposeful, meaningful, transition from mining to call it urban mining, if you like. You know, a very sophisticated, very materials science-based, very chemistry-focused, renewable metal regime, which takes, you know, what's currently millions of panels annually of end of life, quickly scaling to tens of millions, then quickly scaling to hundreds of millions, just in the United States alone. The notion that 30 million, 40 million panels will be coming at end of life, let's say in 2030, you know, that 100 million would be coming end of life in 2040, it's a literal tsunami of waste. To be able to capture that and produce millions of ounces of silver annually, right, from that supply chain, from that waste stream, is what we're really trying to accomplish. It's not just silver. There's silicon metal, there's aluminum, there's glass, there's, in some cases depending on the composition of the panel, gallium, tellurium, indium. You know, so it's a critical mineral, precious metal, critical mineral thesis of pretty massive scale. Going from, you know, a single site, local silver mining operation into literally national expanding to global, you know, urban mining supply chain is dramatic. I guess I would say one more thing. There's no reason that we would stop at solar panels. You know, the electrification of batteries, you know, the electrification of our economies and the electrification of our society requires batteries, requires fuel cells. You're starting to see electric, you know, all electric everything, you know, from cars to robots to data centers, right? Electricity and electrification is the heart and soul of the economy, and we've jumped into it, you know, with competency. You know, we have competency in metallurgies of course, we have competencies in certain precious metals of course. But if you look at the background of our metals team, including myself, like we've managed global industrial supply chains. You know, we're just scratching the surface by trying to corner the southwest region of the United States first out of Nevada on Nevada platform. We're going national and then ultimately international. You know, talk about where we are sort of in this timeline of this aging installed base of- Yeah solar panels and this decommissioning and really just sort of the infrastructure issue that this creates with all of this waste. Yeah. It's monstrous. We see literally the ranges of estimate go from like 1.25 billion -1.4 billion solar panels already deployed in the United States. I think people would be shocked to see the scope of current projects and current deployments that are going on. It's not slowing down. That is for certain. Regardless, you have over 1.2 billion -1.3 billion panels already deployed in the United States alone, and then that number is anywhere between 8-10x if you add up the entire world. You're talking about 10 billion-plus panels already deployed in the world, and they were supposed to last 25+ years. Right. What we're seeing is that a lot of the earliest deployments, I mean, if you're in the Mojave Desert, you know, Arizona, southern California, you know, southern Nevada, you know, the heat variation from extreme heat in the day to extreme cold at night, you know, the expansions, contractions, it wreaks some havoc in some of these panels. Bottom line, we're seeing things come out of the market 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 years. On average, it looks like a whole decade earlier than anybody really anticipated it. Remarkably, a lot of these giant utility companies didn't have end-of-life solutions baked in at the front end, right? Meaning they didn't plan for it as effectively as you might have thought they would have. The last few years have been fascinating. You know, like, 2024, they're getting their head around the problem, right? Everyone's kind of realizing and agreeing on the problem, right? 2025, people are starting to agree on the direction of the solution, but that's tied to us. Like, what are our options? Do they? Does it have to go into a landfill? Do we shred them and send them overseas, which is, for most intents and purposes, illegal? Do we find capacity to treat them in the optimally valuable way? Like, the maximum value is recover 100% of the materials contaminant-free. 2026 has been budgets being established, resources being dedicated, you know, and now excitingly, you know, master service agreements and material flow starting to come to our plants. As you just said, it sort of initially think about it as compliance and landfill avoidance, but then over time, there really is sort of this critical mineral recovery and sort of just general supply chain resilience. You know, where is most of the demand? Maybe you can talk a little bit about sort of the economics of how you guys operate there. Yeah. Your first point is correct, right? The landfills take the beating, right? They're the first ones to get hit by a surprise. Like, what's all this hazardous material? It's not solid waste, it's not construction waste. It's hazardous under RCRA, you know, under the federal laws. I think the landfills were quick to calibrate. Certainly, we're not aware of major institutional landfill companies, you know, taking these materials. If they are, it's very expensive. You know, we even went out and channel checked it. We've quoted, you know, "How much would it cost us to dispose of solar panels?" "Holy crap, that's a lot." You know? That's the first thing. The second thing is, you know, in our government, you know, there's a perception that our government You know, we even had a little bit of anxiety, you know, as we were shifting from, you know, the Biden to the Trump administration. Like, where do they sit on, you know, biofuels and/or renewable energy? You know, we were pleasantly surprised day one when, you know, the executive orders were around energy. You know, it was almost like we're not going to discriminate against energy. We want energy. Geothermal? Yes. Check the box. Biofuels? Yes. Check the box. You know. Oh, solar? You know, this is a little bit like, you know, we don't love solar, we don't love windmills. But that's, that should be contrasted against we need to dominate, and we need more energy, and we need the critical minerals to supply these chains. For what? For electricity, for AI data, compute, for defense. You know, when you think about, automation, robots, drones, it's all electrification. It all fits. The government is actually incredibly supportive. You know, and even recently coming out with, funding opportunities, you know, for people that can take waste, mine tailings, industrial tailings, and generate critical minerals from that. You know, that's not an environmental angle. I don't think they're prioritizing the environmental angle. They're prioritizing the criticality of these minerals to our national security and, quite frankly, just the quality of our social systems, like how we work and how we live. So we're very bullish, you know, on all of that. Let's talk a little bit about sort of the competitive advantages of your technology. Let's dive a little bit more specifically into your plants and your systems here. Talk about where the competitive edges are for you and how really just geography matters so much, as you talked about with the Southwest and the predominance of solar panels there. Yeah. I'm going to hit three points, right? Geography, ultimately logistics, right, and structure, and then tech, if I could, right? Briefly. In terms of geography, California, you know, California, Northern Arizona, Southern Nevada, without question, early adopters of this, of the whole solar, you know, deployment. We see that in the next five years, that California, Arizona, Southern Nevada, even Northern Nevada, is over 50% of the end-of-life market, okay? Nevada happens to be the number one mining jurisdiction in the world by Fraser Institute rankings. What does that mean? Well, one of the things that it means is it has one of the most sophisticated regulatory and jurisdictional infrastructures for dealing with mining. That. You could consider that good or bad, you know, depending on which perspective you look at. We think it's good because Nevada held us to an incredibly sophisticated and high standard for what actually qualifies as recycling, you know, because we have a zero waste solution, which literally means we don't generate any wastewater, we don't generate any chemicals, we don't use any chemicals, there's no chemicals, you know, in our process. We don't have any harmful emissions. We can say with a straight face that of the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of panels and the thousands of tons of materials that have come into our operation, we have not sent one ounce of waste to a landfill, and we don't have one ounce of waste sitting on the site. There's no waste. Nevada held us to a high standard. We met that standard. We think it'll be extremely difficult for a competitor to meet the same standard. Of course, at some point someday, you know, they might. We'll see. We think that's at least two years off if they started tomorrow. We have a head start with beachheads in Nevada for what is essentially more than 50% of the domestic end-of-life market. That's checkbox number one. Number two is, you know, it's tied to logistics and running a national supply chain. We have a lot of experience doing that, right? You're moving materials. We tighten it up in the Southwest region, so that makes it more efficient. When you have plants sitting right on the access road in Southern, you know, from Southern California and Northern Arizona into Vegas, when you have plants sitting right on the, right outside the California border in northern Nevada, like you're sitting logistically in the perfect position to handle half of the U.S. market. But we've already mapped out site three, site four, site five, site six, site seven. Where are they? Well, they're in the epicenters of where all the solar panels are. Why? Because we want to minimize the absolute all-in total cost for our customers to be able to 100% reuse these materials. You know, fully and completely terminate the liability and 100% reuse these materials. The third, so the first one you could say is location, but it's more jurisdiction/permitting. The second one is location, location, seven times over. The third one is technology, and this is where it gets fascinating, Robert. You know, when we look at all of the recyclers, and I guess there's two salient points here. A lot of people put a sign on their truck that says "Recycling," you know. They are very good people, and they're very important parts of the supply chain. In other words, they help decommission, they'll help palletize, they'll help ship, okay? They'll coordinate, you know, business. It's all very positive. Honestly, they're not recyclers. Where is that material going? It's going to go to a landfill, or it's going to go to some dirty, bad, non-terminating process. For customers, if your liability is not terminated, what are you paying for? You know, in our case, the liability is terminated. The liability is eliminated. It does not exist. If some regulator said, "Let's go find that hazardous waste that company disposed of," it doesn't exist. It's like 100% gone, right? Like magic, it's gone. I say that purposely to agitate the conversation. Well, how do you do it? It's the technology. Most of the people that we see doing this are in some form mechanical. They're mechanical disassembly, mechanical deconstruction, okay? They're working at the physical level with these solar panels, and they don't have zero landfill solutions. Most of them generate hazardous waste. What we do at the molecular level, at the atomic level, right, we attack the polymers, the laminates, the plastics, at that level, meaning, you know, what's the kinetics? What's the heat? What's the frequency that most efficiently, from an energy perspective, depolymerizes, deconstructs, right, severs, and then thermally oxidizes these materials so that they become CO2. They're gone, CO2, not harmful. You know, think about ethanol facilities. They pump CO2 into the air like there's no tomorrow, and they're part of the green economy. We have just very little CO2 emissions, very, very little. You know, the polymers, the plastics, the laminates, the glues, they're gone. If those are not gone, that means they're stuck to the metals. If they're stuck to the metals, that means cadmium, lead, other materials are stuck to the metals. That means you're a hazardous waste generator, not a recycler, okay? What people really don't appreciate is the material science, right, and the sophistication of the process to essentially eliminate the contaminants so that you're a generator of clean aluminum, clean glass, and these industrial tailings that are rich in all of these critical minerals and metals. You know, that's that. Look, will those people emerge? Like, I guess we hope so, right? Because, you know, obviously we're not going to be able to handle 10 billion panels on our own, okay? Someone needs to step up, but we don't see it yet. We don't see it yet. We see mechanical deconstructors trying to get more sophisticated with their mechanical deconstruction. If you don't take it, you know, from the physical panel level to the molecular level, then I don't know, you can't compete with what we're doing. If you do that, then you hopefully would be able to compete with what we're doing. Last thing I'll say, Dr. Villamagna, who is the president of our business, who you know has at least a few chemistry-based PhDs, which is nice. You know, educationally, he's super intelligent. That's always nice to have on your side, okay? That's not what's important. What's important is he spent 40 years building industrial manufacturing plants all over the world, India, Europe, like everywhere. He's almost always dealt with hazardous materials, right, at the molecular level, knowing and understanding the chemistries. You know, so it's that know-how, right, that allowed us to hit the ground running, you know, and then spend two and a half years accumulating data on every single chemical composition of every single type of solar panel, and there's over 30, you know. The market does have a lot of variation. The compositions and the materials are very different. We spent all this time mastering that, you know, so now we're scaling it up. We're scaling it up with equipments and the manufacturers of those equipments that he's worked with for two decades. Our agreements with those manufacturers prohibit them from manufacturing any of our engineering designs for anybody else. Right? These are boutique, specialty, heavy equipment manufacturers that he's been working with for two decades. When people ask me, "Who are your suppliers?" We don't want to tell you. We don't want people nagging them. Even if they did, they're prohibited, you know, from building these designs for our competitors, you know. For those that may not understand sort of how rapidly you're moving forward here, you know, help lay out sort of the first plant in Nevada, second one. Sure you got the aggregation hubs. Sort of when you think about network design here, you know, where storage belongs, where processing belongs, how sort of Yeah the national footprint ultimately needs to be. Help sort of lay out what the future looks like here. Absolutely. We're commissioning as we speak. We have a facility in northern Nevada, you know, very close to the California border on all the major highway and rail infrastructure lines, and that facility's been running for over two years, and we are now commissioning. We would call that a demonstration scale facility. It's been running three shifts for as long as I can remember. We are now commissioning an industrial scale facility. Industrial scale means we're loading panels every seven seconds. You know, that means we're unloading materials, you know, continuously as well, and it would have the capacity to do up to 3.3 million panels per year. We're commissioning it now as we speak, and we've guided that it'll be up and running in the second quarter. We're on target for it to be up and running in the second quarter between you and me. You know, second quarter starts in April and ends in June. I would like to have seen it, you know, up and running in early May. You know, it might be late May, it might be early June, but it's going to be up and running in the second quarter. That's what we guided, and then we're going to scale from there. Coincidental with that, like parallel with that, we're securing the second facility in southern Nevada. We already have the permits completely written. They're identical, I mean, identical, to what we just got approved in early January for the first facility, and we will submit those permits. We've actually already submitted the permits because we know where the site is. We're just trying to dot some I's and cross some T's, and then we would order the equipment probably in May. One thing we learned in the first facility cycle was that we estimated about five to six months lead time for equipment. It ended up to be closer to seven to eight months lead time for the equipment, which is why we're pushing June instead of April, you know, in terms of coming online. But if we order in May, then we can have equipment starting to land in December, right? Then we repeat the cycle. Second facility comes online in early 2027. By the end of 2027, you have one facility should be running full, second facility ramping up, you know, on the same scale. That's the near term, okay? Now look, if you can do 3.3 million panels from one production line and you have two up and running, okay, that's 6.6 million panels per year. We're expecting 35 million, you know, for 2030. You know, looking to Texas for the next facility, looking to the border of Virginia, and I'm sorry, Georgia and Florida for the next facility, North Carolina. Ohio is remarkably very central to a massive amount of panels in that Mid-Atlantic area. You know, I guess the answer really is we got to get the first two up and running, we corner half the market. Then how expediently can we secure the next five sites? We've already secured a site in Ohio. How expediently can we secure the next, you know, four sites after that? Secure means, you know, securing a lease, right? Securing a property, submitting permits, and starting to think about storage capability. Ohio has storage capability, right? That's very important for us today for servicing, let's say, the East Coast. Because you can take these panels, they pay us upfront, you can take these panels and store them for up to a year before you need to start processing them. You know? It works out very, very nicely, you know, in terms of the rollout. We hired one of the top regulators, Kayla Holm, from the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection, who was instrumental, right, in ensuring that the state's guidelines were adaptive to such an environmentally powerful solution. You know, you don't want regulations that are designed to protect the environment to stop a recycler from protecting the environment, right? She was so innovative and instrumental, and literally went up to the state's environmental commission to change certain guidelines on the materials that we were producing to accommodate, you know, good, clean recycling. After all that, we said, "Hey, would you like to come work for us?" Because you know, her number one competency is taking, you know, federal RCRA laws and interpreting them for the state of Nevada. Well, we need to understand what they are for Texas, we need to understand what they are for Georgia. What about North Carolina, Ohio? That we can get a jump start on those permits across the whole networks. Bottom line here is we think the most critical de-risker is speed. Speed to securing the locations, which is prerequisite, critically prerequisite to speed in securing the market share. Okay? If we're running three facilities full in 2030, and we're generating $200 million of free cash flow, I'm going to be pretty disappointed at our market share. I'm like, "Eh, I'm not going to be that disappointed with our cash flow. I'm going to be pretty disappointed with our market share." Okay? Because we're the leader. Competition will emerge, right? Forces like landfills and international exports will weigh. Okay? We don't want it to be because, you know, we set our sights too low. Corrado, got two minutes left, and I just want to circle back on one topic here to make sure investors that may be new to the story understand this, right? Sure. In terms of how you collect upfront decommissioning and disposal fees, while also creating value from the recovered material. Just help people understand the two revenue engines to the business here. Absolutely. Maybe one A and one B is we get paid up front for for taking these environmental liabilities and explicitly and absolutely terminating them for our customers. It's a hugely important service that we provide, and we get paid to do it, which we should be. Secondly, in some cases, our customers aren't able to decommission, you know, the fields and logistically get all the panels to us. We provide a second service, we call that one B, you know, called decommissioning services. We do get paid for that, but we do it solely because it's critical to getting the panels into our facility. We call that the upfront revenues. The, you know, or intake revenues, some of our people call those intake revenues. The offtake revenues are selling the aluminum, selling the glass, and selling these, you know, tailings. You know, at the current silver prices, there's some harmony here, where you're getting almost $500 a ton on the intake side, and you're getting almost $500 a ton on the offtake side. Running full, the plants would be less than $200 a ton, you know, all in. Okay. It's extraordinarily profitable, you know, model, but we're providing extraordinarily critical environmental service on the front end, and extraordinary critical minerals for the domestic supply chain on the back end, right? We basically build two businesses into one, if you want to think of it that way. Right. Final 30 seconds here. What should investors be paying attention to here throughout the rest of this year? Yeah. Commissioning the facilities in Q2, operating the facilities in Q2, ramping up of both revenues and customers that come on board. Some of those customers might come on board as partners, as strategic partners. "Hey, let's co-locate sites, let's work together for this massive, you know, end of life problem." For the rest of LODE, we're monetizing our mining assets, we're monetizing some of our other real estate-based assets, which will provide even additional funding for accelerating the rate at which we take over this solar panel market. Right. Yeah. We'll have to get into that on the next conversation, all the additional assets and the Bioleum that are there. Sure. Corrado, thank you so much for the time here. I really appreciate it. Yes, sir. I'll say this, I know we obviously probably ran out of some time there. If there are any investors that would like to schedule a one-on-one here with Corrado, please let me know. Happy to coordinate that. My email blum, B-L-U-M@lythampartners.com. Again, we have additional presentations and fireside chats coming up, so everyone please stick around. Again, Corrado, thank you so much for the time today. Really appreciate it. My pleasure. Outstanding, Robert. Thank you so much.