Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Comstock's Third Quarter 2023 Business Results Webcast. This is Will Maze with RB Milestone. For those of you new to the story, Comstock is commercializing technologies that enable systematic de-carbonization towards the energy transition through three divisions – Comstock Fuels, which converts biomass into net zero renewable fuels; Comstock Metals, which recycles solar panels and critical metals; and Comstock Mining, which holds significant gold and silver resource in the target rich district in Nevada and plans to dramatically expand its reserves through generative AI-enabled mineral discovery. 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, who will be discussing third quarter results and an update of current operations, and will be answering questions at the end of the presentation. If you're interested in asking a question or logged into the Zoom app, you can submit questions to us directly in the Q&A module. Please note that this presentation is being recorded today, October 26, 2023, and will soon be made available on the company's website at comstock.inc. If you are registered for the presentation, you will be receiving a brief survey by email from RBMG. Your response will be very helpful to Comstock in strengthening its investor relations efforts and providing growing transparency 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. 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.

Thanks, Will. Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to Comstock's third quarter 2023 financial results and business update. As Will just said, you have both me and Billy McCarthy on the call today. And we look forward to overviewing a very strong third quarter and taking a much deeper dive into our fuels business. A lot of good detail that we look forward to sharing with you and a very positive outlook on all of our businesses. We also appreciate everyone that participated in the RBMG investor survey. As Will said, the feedback really helps us in delivering on and managing your expectations. You can find the link to the survey on the Comstock, Inc. investor page. We open up the survey after each quarterly call, starting today, and keep them open until the end of the quarter to get all of your feedback. And if it comes to the survey, it directly informs our Investor Relations strategy and communications, and we act on it. For example, we're taking extra time today to better explain our fuels business based on the input and perceptions from that survey. Our update will also include the information from today's press release and our recently filed third quarter Form 10-Q. You'll find the press release at our website at www.comstock.inc, under Investors and in the Newsroom section. And hopefully, you've all had a chance to visit our new Comstock Fuels and Comstock Metals website with a direct link from Comstock's main page under Businesses. Let me start with the corporate and financial updates, then I'll move into the strategic investments, including GenMat, and then cover our Mining and Metals businesses before Billy provides a much deeper review for fuels. As most of you know, we finalized the sale of the 2500 Peru facility, receiving a…

Thank you, Corrado. And bear with me for a second while I bring up these slides. Okay. And I hope everybody can see. Terrific. So, very excited to be here to talk in a lot more detail about Comstock Fuels. And we're going to cover a lot of things today. Corrado and I were in San Francisco last week at the ABLC NEXT Conference, the Advanced Biofuel Leadership Conference, with a number of members of our team as well. And it was really good. We had two days of back-to-back meetings, meeting with peers in the industry and other technology providers, as well as some potential customers and partners. And while it was good, it was also very striking. Most in this biofuel industry still, especially on the technology side, have a very myopic view. They're focused on one project or one technology, and very few people are talking about how their tech can scale to meet industrywide needs. You contrast that with some time I spent earlier this month at the Advanced Biofuel Association Board Meeting in Washington, DC. And we're very proud to be new members of this association, the ABFA. We think it's a group of the most innovative technology developers and the largest fuel producers, who are all working together to advance the industry to new heights, much different than the rest of the pack that we saw at the conference last week. And the truth is, we've always been taking this approach. Scalability has been at the forefront of our requirements from day one. And we're going to show you some more of that. I'm going to cover three topics today. A couple of these are things we talked about with our peers at the conference last week. But more of this, more interestingly, is…

Thanks, Billy. And I hope that everyone found that detail both clear and meaningful. Our fuels team has made tremendous progress and positioned us for what is coming next. As Billy said, we're fully engaging this model with our customers, partners and investors and we're all working toward the execution of the first commercial agreements and many more thereafter. We're working to commercialize fuels with offtake agreements, feedstock agreements, strategic partners that will deliver again, as Billy highlighted, non-dilutive capital and our first production facility. But we can't unilaterally dictate the timing. But I can tell you that everyone engaged has a real sense of urgency. And it's a strategic priority for them to get the feedstock and offtake agreements done sooner than later. We sincerely believe we're enabling the highest value, lowest carbon solution, all the evidence points to it and supports it. And all the companies that we're engaged with are validating our differentiation and now see how much sense this makes for them. Frankly, we really don't see any real alternatives. This is the only feedstock that can practically and meaningfully decarbonize at scale. And as Billy just showed you, our solution enables it. So it's happening now. It's happening in the best holistic and most meaningful way. And we very much look forward to sharing those developments and agreements with you as soon as they're completed. Well, I'd say with that, we can stop. I'm really pleased that we got to share much more information than I think is typical for these calls. But we should go ahead and move on. Do we have some questions?

Well, thanks, gentlemen, for a very insightful presentation. And we do have questions. And as mentioned, we're now moving to the Q&A portion of the call. Reminder, you can submit your questions directly in the Q&A module. We have had many questions come in prior to the call. So let's get started with those. First question, When will the data from the satellite become available? And how do you really see it impacting Comstock and/or GenMat?

Well, within a week or so of the satellite reaching orbit, God willing, it will establish a beacon that our ground station provider will be looking for and working to establish a secure link. So that's like step one. Like once the link is established, the satellite will then orbit and take a limited series of images that will then need to be transmitted, downlinked and decrypted. We do that all with our, our service provider on the ground. From our perspective, we're actually putting a big buffer on that entire setup and that entire process establishment with the ground station. We're thinking two months sort of on the outside. So everyone should be thinking mid-January, in my opinion, to be safe for verification of the live operations. Once the process is in place and verified and functioning, then we'll start more specific scans of the Comstock and some other mineral properties. From there, our teams, who are already working together, will integrate that data with the existing historic data, as I mentioned, and continue to build a new predictive model of the Comstock geology. Ultimately, those models will guide our drilling and what we call ground truthing that we hope will validate the predictions, validate the geologic models, and frankly, accelerate and advance us to our 2 million gold equivalent target and beyond. But, ultimately, it does something more than that. From GenMat's perspective and ours, it creates a new mineral discovery platform that can be used globally. So we couldn't be more excited. It's a pioneering activity. But so far, all the lights are green.

Very interesting. Next question comes in is congratulating you on the New Orleans conference. He says that I know it's not an easy conference to get into, an invite. Will the presentation from the conference also be made public?

Yeah. Honestly, I've been trying to enter the New Orleans conference for a few years. I'm sure there's some people laughing or smiling on the other side of this call about that. It is by invitation only. Brien Lundin found the Comstock story, and in particular, GenMat's existing and developing capability fascinating. And they've been getting a lot of demand for how AI is being used for mineral discovery. And we're all actually very excited about next week. This conference, in particular, has a tremendous number of technical analysts in representation, certainly sophisticated resource investors and some very, very high quality companies. So, yeah, thank you for that. We're looking forward to it. Any presentation that we make, similar to the one Billy just made today, we will post it on our website and file an 8-K form.

Next question is asking, when will you actually see revenue from Comstock Metals? And do you expect metal segment to be profitable at the demonstration scale?

As I mentioned on our call, I think I mentioned, our preliminary industry scale financial model is very robust. The 75,000 to 80,000 ton per annum industry scale, from what we've estimated and diligenced so far is it's remarkable. We look forward to giving you that guidance in the first quarter of next year once the demonstration site is up and running. The startup rate and the demonstration facility of 4,000 to 8,000 tons really is most likely a breakeven scenario. Although with these measurements, it could be profitable at the higher volumes. But once the panels start flowing, we'll fine tune the process, we'll finalize the engineering for the industry scale facility, and we'll give updates and guidance on that. The sooner we get a few months of startup operations under our belt, the sooner we can finalize all of those details, but we don't see any major obstacles in that path. Revenue really starts as soon as we're permitted and receiving panels that we can process. We're a little bit reliant on the permits and the Nevada Department of Environmental Protection, our main regulator, who, frankly, is pretty desperately understaffed. We just met with them yesterday. And the good news is that the air quality permit, typically the more complex one, typically the one I get anxious about, seems to be right on track for this year. The solid waste operating permit looks like it'll come right after the air quality permit now. But we know that they're reviewing the permit. We met with them yesterday. And quite frankly, it's very similar to the prior permit that we got approved last year. So once we receive the permits, everything will be in place, we'll immediately start it up, and we'll move right into operations. We're going to be operating in the first quarter of next year, it seems, come hell or high water. So we're looking forward to all of that.

The next question coming in is, we'd like to see some insider buying, can we expect some insider buying?

I'm going to say yes at the beginning, yes at the end. But I would first like to acknowledge that management and the board today hold over 11 million shares, and really all of us have our most meaningful net worth, and in some cases, our lives tied into the success of the company. I personally haven't seen too many senior management teams or boards, for that matter, more fully committed and dedicated to what they're doing from what I see from our teams. It's truly an honor to be part of it. I don't I don't say that lightly. The fuels guys have been spending – it's probably almost two decades of their lives and certainly the last 10 years bringing what Billy just reviewed with you to fruition. I'd also encourage you guys to all invest in the company more because of what we're accomplishing and the impact expected from those achievements. They're game changers and the real evidence of the progress that our teams are making, rather than if we own 11 million shares or more than 11 million shares. But I get it. Like my father in law taught my son, there's no sense pissing into the wind here. So, yes, you should expect some insider buying. We'll do it. We'll do it as soon as we can.

The next question is regarding the fuels. We do have a couple, so I'm going to have a follow on to this. But the insights of Comstock Fuels were very helpful. Is it right to think that revenues are further off even though the market for your solutions is so massive?

I think this is probably one of the more important questions and something we really wanted to address and, ultimately, surface from what we've been seeing across the board from the investor perception analysis. Look, all of our investors are absolutely right to be focused on our first commercial agreements because they will validate the efficacy of our solution, they will demonstrate offtake from major sophisticated customers, they're going to secure the highest yielding feedstocks from industry leaders, and frankly, present an overwhelming financial valuation for our company. These agreements, when we validate to you what we already know internally, right, it'll establish the foundation and the beginning of an incredible value creation that will also start to get recognized by a much broader investment community. It also brings the non-dilutive financing that funds exactly what fuels needs to achieve. We've put a tremendous amount of not just thought and planning into this. We're engaged in the market. It's happening. Right? But this is a little different than I would say a somewhat false narrative of just wanting to focus on immediate revenue. We announced revenue, for example, for mining in a manner that I thought was outstanding. It covered all of our mining costs. And the market yawned, even though it was really a great deal for us. The agreements we're negotiating now will completely change the reality for the company in remarkably valuable ways. The progress is incredible, and it's going to happen. So I believe it could happen this quarter. I believe it could happen before December 31. If it was up to us, it would be a layup. Could happen January 1, January 15, January 30. I can tell you, it's coming soon. And whatever happens – and I'm sorry, whenever it does happen, I'll be enjoying the celebration. I hope you guys will be too. It will enable non-dilutive capital, liquidity and tremendously credible value even if actual revenues off of a specific agreement is a few years off. That's really why I wanted Billy to present what he presented earlier. It's important that you and our target investors see the massive value that we believe is about to be validated and realized and we're just going to continue to be completely transparent about it.

We did have a follow-on related question. The question is, are you able to elaborate on the license with RenFuel? Will they collaborate on hub one and how our license fees split on future hubs?

Billy, do you want to take that one?

I'll say that our collaboration with RenFuel is very, very close. And this is not a transaction where we're licensing some tech and we don't talk to them. And we're going to be working very closely together. We are the primary vehicle where this technology of theirs is getting commercialized. And it is, again, fully integrated into our processes you saw on the slides. It's a key partner process. And the way we've structured the royalties there is a very fair allocation of the value created in those steps. There's some technology of ours that's been put together with theirs. And we wrap that section of the process and developed the formula to do that. I don't think we're releasing the specifics of that. But I will say it's – the numbers I talked about were all net of any other license agreements we have.

We're now pressing up against time. Corrado, maybe you could provide some closing remarks and provide some important milestones that investors should anticipate in the next quarter and in 2024.

Yeah. Maybe just in the context of the summary, well, for fuels, it's what we just said, right? Executing a commercial agreement. That includes offtake, feedstock, non-dilutive capital that could come all at once, it could come in two or three quick steps. But it's going to be with very well-known companies that we're going to be proud to call our partners. As Billy mentioned, we're also going to launch a DOE grant project, also with world class partners, which is really designed to enhance our already industry leading position. And again, as Billy mentioned, we'll put out some more info on that when it's final-final. For metals, we'll be finalizing the permitting of our photovoltaics recycling system here in Northern Nevada. We'll be finalizing the deployment of the production equipment and readying it for production. We're securing feedstocks, as we speak. That's what the team is spending all their time on now. And we'll start the commissioning of the demonstration scale early next year, and move it right into production. I guess for mining, I would just say receiving a million bucks in revenue this quarter, of which $500,000 we just received this week from our leasing agreement that nobody seems to be excited about. And of course, importantly, developing in collaboration with GenMat an AI based next generation exploration tool that we're going to be talking about next week in New Orleans, and using our extensive geological and geophysical data along with GenMat's new data to really predict, enhance, sharpen the target that we already feel good about. So, either we're going to get to that target faster and cheaper or we're going to get it to a bigger target. So it just positions us to expand that 2 million gold equivalent ounce target, but don't dismiss that – if it's effective, if it's efficient, we're going to have something that's going to transcend the Comstock. So I think that's it – fuels, metals, mining. I appreciate everyone's time today. It's going to be an exciting next month, two months, three months, for Comstock and our stakeholders. If we missed anyone because we run out of time with the call, please do reach out through Will at RBMG. And we're really happy to have follow ups from today. And really thank everybody for being part of all of this. Have a great day.

Thanks, Corrado. Thanks, Billy. And thanks, everyone, for joining the webinar today. There were quite a number of questions we were not able to get to. We will be able to download those through the Zoom app and we will respond to those as we can. And also, today's webinar recording will be made available on Comstock's website shortly. We'd also like to remind you that we will be sending out a survey from RBMG, which can also be found on the company's website, and we would really appreciate your participation in that survey. If you have any additional questions that have not been addressed today, please feel free to send those over to comstock@rbmilestone.com. Again, that's comstock@rbmilestone.com. Thanks once again and you are now free to disconnect.