Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Comstock Incorporated Second Quarter 2023, Business results, Webcast. This is Will Maze with RB milestone. For those of you new to the story Comstock is an innovator of technologies that enable systematic de-carbonization and the energy transition by efficiently converting under utilize natural resources into renewable energy products through three divisions Comstock Fuels, which converts biomass into net zero renewable fuels, Comstock Metals, recycles e-waste and critical metals and Comstock Mining, which holds significant gold and silver resource in the target rich district in Nevada. Comstock shares are listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LODE. Joining us today is the Company's Executive Chairman and CEO, Corrado De Gasperis, and COO, William McCarthy, they will discuss second quarter results and give an update on current operations, and we'll also be answering questions at the end of the presentation. And if you're interested in asking a question or logged into the Zoom app or web platform, you can submit your questions directly to us in the Q&A module. Please note that this presentation is being recorded today, August 10, 2023, and will soon be made available on the Company's website @comstock.inc. If you are registered for the presentation, you'll be receiving a brief survey by email from RBMG. Your response to the survey will be greatly appreciated and helpful to us in Comstock in strengthening its investor relations efforts going forward. We appreciate your participation. Today's call may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, performance or developments to differ materially from those contained in the statements that are not guarantees of future performance of the Company. No assurance can be given that any of these events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will occur or if they do occur, what benefits the Company will obtain from them. Also, some risks and uncertainties may be out of control of the Company. Comstock has a full disclaimer contained in their presentation on their website. Lastly, RBMG is not a registered investment adviser or a broker-dealer for more information, please visit rbmilestone.com. Now it's my pleasure to introduce Mr. Corrado De Gasperis and Mr. William McCarthy, Gentlemen, the stage is yours.

Thank you, Will. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Comstock's second quarter 2023 report. As Will just mentioned, you have both Billy McCarthy, our Chief Operating Officer, and myself here today for the business updates and the Q&A following the call and you'll get an even more in depth review today on our fuels and metals recycling businesses from Billy as part of our presentation.Our updates will include covering the information from today's press release and our recently filed second quarter report on Form 10-Q. You'll find our press release at www.comstock.in/investors/newsroom. You can also see our updated and new websites at www.comstock.inc, where you'll find a significant amount of investor relevant data on that same Investors tab. And also please note, as Will said, the RBMG Investor Survey button, where we have initiated this quarterly investor survey and engaged RBMG to survey you and provide us your feedback. And we are very committed to getting that information and publishing the results quarterly. We're sincere about that and we hope that you'll participate, go in and provide that feedback. We also have newly dedicated websites for Comstock Fuels and Comstock Metal, that can now be continuously updated with content from those businesses and will have Comstock Mining up and running soon. You can access them all from the main Comstock website. Let me start today's update with a corporate update of our investments, including the sale of the Proof facility and our equity investments in both Green Lion and the Sierra Springs Opportunity Fund. We finalized the sale of the Proof facility and we've received now $21 million in cash and another $6 million of ABML stock. Once that stock is sold, we will have received over $15 million in net cash proceeds. We were actually just notified yesterday that…

Thank you, Corrado, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm excited to share some more details on our development activities in both Comstock Metals and Comstock Fuels. I'll start with Comstock Metals at Upload. Back in June, we talked about what we could do in the electrification products recycling space. Today I'm going to talk about what we are doing, and it's quite simple. We're building a market leading regional solar panel recycling business. We're starting in northern Nevada with the goal to expand throughout the Southwest. Our thesis for this business is based on three points. First, the data shows that with the first wave of solar panel deployments heading towards their end of life, this industry will grow substantially over the next several years. Second, previous attempts at commercial recycling solutions have been hampered by high costs. Our process operates at a lower cost per ton, making the economics competitive today with the only other viable solution landfills. Third, speaking of landfills, with more solar panels competing for limited landfill space, the potential for more regulation of the disposal of solar panels, the cost of landfill disposal is likely to face continued upward pressure. So our thesis is that in an expanding market with rising prices, an effective low cost solar panel recycler can capture significant market share at high profitability. Now, let me share some more details about how we plan to do this by walking through the near term objectives that we're tracking. The first phase of our plan is to construct and commission a commercial scale demonstration facility and to operate it profitably. We've recently leased a building in Silver Springs, Nevada to house this facility, which we call Project Vega. We're readying the site now for the installation of the production system later this year. Permit…

Thank you, Billy. I can't contain the excitement just being able to say Biolum oil publicly describing HBO, the ability to create drop in fuels. Billy said it right, fuels and metals are ready to deploy. The tech is TRL six and rising. We're passing all of these third party tests. We are fully engaged and we're on track to deliver commercial agreements for both fuels and metals this year. As we reflect on the renewable fuels and renewable metal landscapes against just our known and our now ready technologies, we can easily argue that we're dramatically undervalued. I mean, it's actually ridiculous based on any current comp or any current valuation you'd want to apply to this. But unlocking that value is our job. It comes down to successfully commercializing this technologies, generating the revenue, generating the earnings, while successfully marketing the technologies. I hope just this conversation gives so much better appreciation of the magnitude of our platform, the magnitude of our partners, the level of partners and customers that we're targeting, and that's the value that we want to convey, that we want people to appreciate and understand. As I said earlier, this will happen. It's not a question of if, simply, but when. And not coincidentally, we're now also attracting more industry three analysts and we are now scheduling with RBMG non-deal road shows, including the Sadati conference next week, which you can all register for and listen to, as well as additional virtual and live investor meetings that are already being scheduled for September. And frankly, throughout. The rest of this year. We are commercializing mining showed it already, Metals is showing it coming fast. And Fuels in perhaps the biggest way is about to show it putting us in a whole new state of reality as a Company and as an investment. I can tell you it's all happening now with Billy providing you the details. It's just energizing throughout our enterprise. I think we'll just stop there and turn it and open it up to questions. Do you have our first question?

Yeah. Well, thank you very much Corrado and Billy, and thanks for the insightful presentation. And as Carrado mentioned, we'll now move to the Q&A portion of the call and we have had some questions submitted prior to the webinar.

[Interpreted] So we have had several actually on one topic and that was asking for more updates and timing around Fuels potential for a commercial agreement and what type of counterparty that agreement may be with. So if you could comment on that?

Yeah, Billy, why don't you give a little extra color on that from what you just said?

Yeah. So to restate the next step in our process, we've worked through all the prerequisites and the next step and the next agreement is with that downstream refinery partner. We're now producing a drop in feedstock for an existing refinery and when we get through the qualification and find that first refinery that's ready to take this product. Now, as far as who that is, I think I shared earlier, there are 17 active biorefineries operating in the United States. There's ten that are really substantial size and that's going to double here soon. And that's. Addressable market for this offtake contract right now. I think we're very well covered across that universe, and there's a couple of different factors that drive those decision processes. But we're getting very close, and it's our next item up on the docket to check off.

[Interpreted] Very good. Thanks, Billy. You got next question up is regarding financial outlook. Really, it's on cash flow expectations and future financing potential requirements?

I'll take that one, Will. So I mentioned on the call that we're now fully, thankfully, fully capable of monetizing some of our current investments. Right on tap is the American battery stock that we got as part of the Peruse sale that $6 million will be very comfortably liquidated over a two to three month period, so that addresses our immediate term. We're also getting some nice proceeds from the sale of the Green Lion shares targeted scheduled for this quarter as well. So in the near term, things are good. We are very active with the Silver Springs. More active than I've ever know. I really think the Microsoft entrance right into Silver Springs, right across the street from our know, created a whole surge of new activity. Yes. And the most immediate impact of that the most immediate impact of that is marking the existing properties to some of those comps. And so in the near term, that's our mindset we're not interested in dilutive. Financings, but we are interested in growth. And it's a big reason why we've scheduled a lot of these non deal road-shows. We want people appreciating what's happening. We want people appreciating what's about to happen. A lot of these institutional investors need the kind of validation that Bill just described and we're ready to describe it. We're ready to get face to face. We're ready to walk people through everything that we've accomplished. For me, I'm literally giddy to be able to talk about HBO and Biolum Oil openly, to be able to validate the yields, to be able to explain how we can literally, even with the current state, double the feedstock to the entire industry. And that's just a drop in the bucket for what the potential is. Beyond that with Biolum, we're going to be out. We're going to be explaining that. We are going to be announcing a leading carbon CI score. We're going to be announcing progress of deploying a full production facility for metals. We're going to be announcing commercial agreements and we think that's going to all take care of itself very effectively as it converges into the fourth quarter with the mantra being growth, the discussion is going to be growth with specificity. So I think a lot of the shareholders that have been so incredibly patient with this process are going to be rewarded and I'm really looking forward to all of that.

[Interpreted] Thanks, Corrado. We have another question here. You provided a great update here on your businesses. This one specifically is asking if you could provide a little bit more color on the solar recycling business. When is the initial launch expected? Who supplies this e waste and who pays the fees? And how large is this market potential?

Billy, please take that one as well.

Yeah, absolutely. So we're really targeting a launch beginning of next year, full commissioning and operations. At that point, I just want correction. I think the term e waste has a slightly different meaning here. So we're trying to be pedantic. Electrification product waste is how we describe photovoltaic panels. But these panels are generally the way we're looking at the business right now. There's two main sources. One is sort of waste collectors who are collecting them at the source, whether that be a construction site or otherwise, and looking for a place to bring them today. They pay to dispose of them in landfills. And this business would be a similar tipping fee business where we're paid to dispose of them in a more sustainable manner. The second large source of panels are large utility scale deployments. That's the second segment of the market that we're talking to and evaluating, and we think a lot of the growth will come in that segment as well.

[Interpreted] Great. Thanks, Billy. Next question is talking about commercial readiness, the TRL scale do they're asking if you could review the commercial readiness of each of the divisions and also give a little bit more color around the TRL scale definitions. And one question was asking, what is sort of revenue differential or opportunity between, say, TRL Six and a TRL Nine?

Billy?

Sure. Well, TRL Six is that we've demonstrated process in a relevant environment, in a commercially relevant environment. And some cases that means we've linked the system together into a continuous process. If that's what we're trying to achieve, sometimes it can mean we've shown multiple discrete steps. Again, if that's the way the process gets implemented in production, it's about doing it in a relevant way, scaled up to a point where we understand that there will or will not be changes as we scale up. So to give you an example, for fuels, we run a small pilot system, and we run a very large pilot system. Now, on a day to day basis, we're operating our small pilot system. It's 15 day because it's convenient. It's also because we've done hundreds of runs on the large system and proven that there is no change in process from small to large. These are the factors that go into this determination of TRL Six. And I say in every one of these cases, what we've sought out to do is get validation from other third parties, whether they be prospective clients or other third party engineers that we work with to make sure we're not being a little overzealous in our estimates. Right. We're always checking ourselves on those. Once you're at TRL Six, we're ready to go to scale up, we're ready to go to commercialization. So so I think the way I look at it is that the opportunity is tremendous at TRL Six. At TRL Nine, you're stamping out another copy of the thing you just built. It's a production business. It's a fixed set of economics. There's not a growth opportunity there. So we see that. Opportunity to take things from TRL Six to TRL Seven, to TRL Eight, to TRL Nine as the greatest opportunity in all of these different technology segments as we look at this energy transition economy that we operate in.

[Interpreted] Fantastic. Thank you, Billy. I believe we're coming up here on time. This last question is asked, asking for an update on the Genmat business and the expected satellite launch date.

All right, yeah, I'll take that one. I guess it is coming up on the time. Well, so maybe a good way to conclude. Look, the expected launch date is in the fourth quarter. I mean, it was a wonderful relief when the regulators cleared the launch and gave approval for that they're scheduled to do in the fourth quarter. They're very much looking forward to due in the fourth quarter. There are still some prerequisites that go along with that, so it's never guaranteed, but it's looking very good. We're excited about it because really the hyperspectral imaging and the data which is only one small piece of what Genmat can do for mineral discovery the real big piece is the AI's ability to take all of the information not just this diverse new hyperspectral information patient but the 150 years worth of data that we have on the stock and correlate. It collaborate, it predictively, generate new mineral targets for us. As I mentioned during the Upload 23, exploration drilling conventional activities in terms of discovering new minerals, it's very difficult. The industry is facing a wall, a very hard wall in terms of new mineral discoveries. They've essentially fallen off the cliff. We have a tremendous amount of data which makes our exploration a risk significantly lower than most other greenfield or relatively newer exploration sites. If we couple that with this kind of intelligence we can not only much more efficiently expand our resource which we're planning to do here but also effectively to increase it much, much more. So that's that update. I close with one other aspect, though. Genmap, Billy, myself and Kevin were down in Austin, Texas last week for most of the week, frankly, with Deep and the Genmat team and what…

Well, thanks, Corrado. Thanks, Billy. Thanks, everyone, for joining today. I recognize that there's a number of questions we didn't get to, and if you registered and put your email in the registration, we will be answering your questions. Also, if you have further questions after the call, please feel free to send them to ir@Comstockinc.com. Again, that's ir.comstockinc.com. Today's webinar will be the recording will be made available on Comstock's website soon. Again, just want to thank everybody for joining us today and we'll look forward to speaking to you in the near future.

And please do go to our website, the Investor page, and complete the Investor survey. We're eager to hear from everyone.

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