Good afternoon, and thank you for joining Comstock Inc.'s Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Call and Business Update. I'm Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations. Today is Thursday, August 14, 2025. 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-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2025, and issued a press release summarizing second quarter results. Both documents are available on our website. As a reminder, Comstock is listed on NYSE American with the ticker load LODE. Joining me today is Corrado De Gasperis, Comstock's Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Judd Merrill, Comstock's Chief Financial Officer. We received more than 40 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 Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Corrado De Gasperis. Corrado, you may begin.

Thanks, Zach, and welcome, Judd and Zach and all the investors and stakeholders interested in Comstock for the second quarter results and update. I'm going to use some slides. So, for those that can see the webcast, I think it will be very effective. For those who are just on a dial-in, I will try to voice over what we're looking at so that you can get the full gist of the update. It's outstanding. And there's a heavy, heavy emphasis now following the separation of Bioleum back in May on our metals, right? I think in our January shareholder letter, we said the real objective of getting through 2025 was in large part certain transformational transactions that would result in a public Nevada-based metals company and an Oklahoma-based oil and gas company, both certainly at the highest end of renewability. And so that's what we're getting to. It's a remarkable thing, completing that separation of Bioleum in May, getting them independently and separately funded by strategic investors. We understand through the financial accounting and reporting process that we will, in the near future, be fully deconsolidating them also from our financials. We think that's important so that people can have a clear view of what the Comstock Metals and the metal operations look like, forward-looking and real time as well as what the fuels business looks like. As Zach said, we will make some forward-looking statements. But I'd like to take you through a presentation of some aspects of corporate and the recent transactions that we just completed as well as a deep dive into the metal recycling business. It's taken off. It's moving very, very fast. And the recent transaction that we just completed fully funded us through industry scale operations being up and profitable. So, it was…

Thank you, Corrado. As I mentioned at the beginning of the call, we received more than 40 questions prior to the call. And I can see we have a number of additional questions coming through Zoom. Corrado and Judd, our first question is, congratulations on the funding. We really want to see the solar recycling maintain its market share lead. Have you already negotiated or ordered the equipment?

Yes. I think I just mentioned that. So let me say something. After about 4 or 5 months of operating a demo facility, we knew we could produce clean zero landfill materials. So that was a huge thing. What we did for the next 12 months was 2 things. We put every single type of panel, we could -- we can get our hands on through that thing. I don't care if it's monocrystalline, cylindrical, the thin film, those little tile concoctions. I mean, we put everything through the system, proved it, proved it, proved it, proved it, number one. Number two, Fortunato expanded and built a database of every possible thermal cycle time, every kinetic, every chemistry. And with all that data, with all that know-how, we finalized design of the larger system. Someone said to me, it looks like you're scaling up 87x. It's completely not correct. We're doing 5,000 tons a year now. We're going to go up to 100,000 tons, a very, very standard almost by the book scale up, going from lab to pilot to now full demonstration operating. We're almost on 20 months up to just a 20x scale up. And guess what, that scale-up is coming with all of the same manufactured equipment from the same manufacturer and that manufacturer we negotiated, we enhanced, we modified, we finalized those designs so that we literally were ready today to purchase all of that equipment. Most of it requires like a 35% to almost 50% deposit. And so, it's about $5 million that will go right away tomorrow that will keep us on track for landing all this equipment by the end of the year.

What are the lead times for the equipment? Should we expect higher CapEx due to tariffs?

That's a good question. So, the lead time is 4 to 6 months, right? And that's not really a range. That's 4 months for one type of equipment, 5 months for another type of equipment, little buffer. So, people can understand how, for us, getting this ordered by now is absolutely critical so that it could coincide and synchronize with our permits coming in by the end of this year. All of our equipment is manufactured domestically. We have 2 major suppliers in California, very close to home. We have one in Oregon. So, it's like no tariffs, no tariffs.

Can you phase in the capital for a facility?

So that was a question that I think probably came up because of something I previously said. We had laid out a scenario where we could phase in like instead of $9 million to $10 million, sort of phase in 6 million and then another 3 million to 4 million. But the way the ultimate crushing and separating system was designed, we had -- I would call it almost like a mini breakthrough where it just makes more sense to deploy the entire system. So, we won't phase it. It will be 100,000 -- well, we're not going to phase the first production line in the 100,000-ton system. Theoretically, we could deploy another 100,000-ton system in that same facility when the demand calls for it. But the demand is ramping up, right? The projects are ramping up. The intimacy with the big utility companies is forging forward. And this won't be linear. It won't be -- this thing is going to improve 10% or 20% every quarter until we're at 10x. It's spiky. And when it's spiky, it means big orders and big panels. And if you're not in a position to take them and process them, then you better be in a position to take them and store them. If you're not in a position to do either of those things, you're going to miss the market. So, deploying this capacity fast is critical, less likely to phase, a full line will go in right away.

Can you permit and build facilities in parallel? Are the other states easier or harder to permit in?

So, I mentioned Nevada. I would put Nevada on the harder end of the scale. We did -- Nevada somehow became a recycling hub, not for solar panels, of course, we're the only ones doing that, but for batteries. You've got Redwood, you've got American Battery. You've got some other companies that are recycling here. So, the regulations, every state interprets the federal regulations a little differently. Some of them coordinate with each other. But because Nevada is sophisticated, because of the mining industry's platform here, they take it very hard and very seriously. So, the good news is we're through one of the hardest tests. We understand that Texas is easier, no disparagement or opinion on that. What we did do, though, is we hired one of the top regulators from the Nevada Department of Environmental Protection, who was responsible for a lot of these regulations, guidelines and implementations for hazardous waste handling and recycling. She's already scanning the country for the sites that we're -- and the states that we're interested in, and we're already preparing for how we might modify our existing permitting regime once we leave Nevada. Now, I think there's no question we're going to get this first one commissioned in Q1, operating in Q2. We're going to try to go faster. There isn't any reason we shouldn't go faster for the second facility in Nevada, as long as we get that permit filed before the end of this year. That will keep us on track to go faster for Facility 2, get it up and running, let's say, Q1 of next year. And then I think then though, the question is relevant. Like, what could we do in advance to at least site select 2 or 3 sites at the same time, at least start the permitting for 2 or 3 sites at the same time and at least enable storage. Because if you do that, if you have storage, which has much shorter lead time for permitting, and if you have any breakthrough in storage, if there's a preexisting storage, whatever, then you'll be taking business right away even before you get the permit. So, the permit for processing. So, I think, as I said earlier, if we do 1 a year for 3 years and we have a 30% market share, I personally feel like we dropped the ball. If we have a -- look, I want 100% market share, but we'll see what happens, right? We get 50%, 60%, 70%, it will be because we went for it all, not because we were satisfied with less. So, when you have 55 million of facility, you start thinking about 5, 6, 7 facilities. And remember, everybody, we're only talking about the United States. We haven't talked about anything else. So, it's big.

A person is confused by the potential market. Is it millions of solar panels or millions of tons?

So well, ultimately, it's both. So today, or at least in 2024, we saw over 3 million panels come to end of life, 3 million panels, which is about 100,000 tons. In 2030, it's going to be 1 million tons in the United States. In 2050, we're projecting 8 million tons. So, it's millions of panels today. it will be tens and then hundreds of millions of panels in the future. It's hundreds of thousands of tons today. It will be millions of tons in the future. Good question, though. Good clarification.

And metals success seems to rely on long-term contracts. MSAs are good, but do you expect stronger, longer guaranteed contracts?

I think this is a really -- this question is really profound in the sense of what the market is. So let me reverbalize. There's 3 things that give us competitive advantage. One, zero landfill solution. Okay? We don't have one operating competitor that represents that they're zero landfill. I mean, the best we've heard is we can do up to 90% recovery. I mean, someone might have said 95%, I can't remember, but 0 landfill, number one. Number two, you have the capacity to handle millions and millions of panels. The only people that have the capacity to handle millions and millions of panel are us and a landfill. The major landfill companies don't want this stuff. They're not taking this stuff. California, Texas, no. So where is this stuff going? There's shady stuff happening, right? So, we're dealing our customer base, 85% of the market that we're projecting are highly sophisticated and responsible utility companies that have HS&EP professionals, you would be shocked to hear maybe that the top 2 utility companies in California have directly called our regulators in Nevada, directly reviewed our permits with them. That's what we want. Now, you've got scale, you've got environmental peace of mind for your customers. You're literally selling them environmental peace of mind, because if you can't -- if you can't destroy and transform those materials into a useful product, that's a tail on a liability that the customer is stuck to. It's like a super fun thing. So, we sell them peace of mind definitively, and we can scale it. So today, the scaling issue is it's nascent. Like if you get even a big company that has 50,000, 60,000, 80,000 panel, we took 80,000 panels in from one customer in Q1. You might have somebody able to…

Why are the asset sales taking so long? What is really happening there? Can you provide some better insight?

So I mentioned it briefly. The power grid bottleneck when Google and Microsoft and Tract, all came in heavy and negotiated the power agreements that they needed to operate their data center. Switch did that a long time ago. Everything was kosher, everybody was happy, right? Then you get Powerhouse and then you get Encore and then you get -- I mean, I can go on and on. And Nevada Energy is like, well, okay, 6-month lead time becomes 12-month lead time becomes 18-month lead time, becomes a 2-year lead time. 2-year lead time is manageable for large industrial development, but it made a lot of people pause. And what they did was they basically scoured the country for megawatts. So, look, there's 50 megawatts in San Antonio. Let's go do a data center. Oh, look, there's 65 megawatts in Georgia. Let's go do a data center there. And everybody ran around chasing and finding all these inefficiencies in the market. Now that's gone. Now people are pulling tens and hundreds of billions of dollars, like sovereign nations, hundreds of billions, our federal government, it's the whole AI compute data center, and it's not about making money on data. It is about that, of course. It's also about who's going to win this AI race. Everybody and their mother wants to put mega money, they say, "Oh, we don't have any power". We don't care. Let's get natural gas turbines. Let's get geothermal, let's get solar, let's get nuclear. So, what's happening now is that these consortiums have aligned themselves to do these things together. And quite frankly, it's on a bigger scale than I ever even fathom. So, we're now engaged with 4 or 5 of these new paradigm approaches and I'm much more confident, although no one will give me any kudos. I don't want any credibility on this until we sell them, right? I know we've gone through a little bit of roller coaster. We understand the roller coaster. It's not lack of effort. It's not in competence. It's -- the market is dynamic. And so net-net, it means higher values to our property, but we need to get them sold and move on.

Corrado, Judd also serves as the President of Comstock Mining. Our next question is, are we going to sell or mine the gold and silver mineral assets?

So look, Judd has an extensive career in precious metal mining, 3 distinct companies, excluding ours, that led to sales to intermediate or major mining companies. That's an uncommon track record. we're going to monetize the assets. I can't give any better color than that, but there's companies that would buy them. There's companies that would joint venture and fund them. There's companies that would buy a percentage in joint venture and fund them. There's a big spectrum. So, we're -- it's not as heavy as the real estate discussions that are going on, but it's absolutely picking up. So, I don't know where it's going to land. But what our goal is, is, a, some money, hopefully, it's meaningful; and b, we unlock the value of this thing for our shareholders. So maybe separating, maybe spinning them. But it's one of the transformational transactions that I alluded to in the January shareholder letter. But I'm going to tell you right now, for the first 5 or 6 months of the year, all we got was inquiries that sort of played out as being not credible or not meaningful. And now we're getting some meaningful incredible inquiries. Again, without Judd, I'm not sure how well we would have been able to prioritize those things. Now they can be fully prioritized.

Corrado, as a shareholder, this person is not clear what they get from a future Bioleum IPO, will it get shares equal to the shares?

Again, apologies for me that to the extent we caused any confusion initially using terms like spinout and maybe examples of what was possible, we might have set the wrong expectation. So, there was no real way to efficiently do a share-for-share spinout, okay? So that got taken off the table very quickly. There's no way to do it in a tax-free manner for our shareholders. More importantly, Bioleum is not generating revenue or profit yet. So, taking that company public in the near term would have been an absolute disaster in my opinion. So, what we did do was we protected the investment with the preferred, and we have 76% today of the underlying common, 32.5 million shares. The way that our agreement is written is that we can't convert to common shares until there is an IPO. If there's an IPO and we hold on to the investment, we're limited in the amount of common shares that we could convert unless we wanted to distribute it to our shareholders, in which case we could distribute it all to our shareholders. I have no idea when it's going to go public, what the value is going to be when it goes public and how -- and if we would distribute it to shareholders. However, if the company goes public and it's a multi, multibillion dollar enterprise and we own a lot of it, okay? If it's public, if you have a validated public valuation, then the probability and chances of it showing up in our valuation are a hell of a lot higher, more probable than it would be today, where we're seeing almost none of it show up in our valuation. So ensuring that they are funded, ensuring that they can continue this incredible business plan, which is…

Thank you, Corrado. Well, it looks like we have come up on 1 hour. So that concludes Comstock's Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Call and Business Update. 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 at Comstock Inc. Please follow us. And Corrado, did you want to your closing thought?

Yes. I just -- I want to make 3 closing statements. One is I noticed someone had asked Zach that there was -- why was a bit of the use of proceeds like over -- a little over $1 million being used for Northern Comstock. And I'd like to just address that one because as part of these proceeds and as part of our agreement, we had acquired some very, very, very valuable mineral properties in the central part of the district. We did it through this Northern Comstock entity. And what the agreement says is that if we have a liquidity event of over $12.5 million, we have to accelerate one payment. So, we're accelerating one payment, but here's the good news. This acceleration results in the completion of the payments for that mineral property, 100% complete, and it also represented almost $820,000 of expenses in our annual P&L that are gone. So no more obligation, no more expenses going forward from that. And we own 100% of these mineral properties that have hundreds of thousands of ounces associated with them. So that's number one. Number two, we concluded prior to this offering, fully extinguishing the obligation associated with the acquisition of the organosolv technology for fuels with American Science and Technology. That's extinguished. And that had also like almost $1 million a year of lease and rent expense that's been extinguished. We now own the property 100%. We pay no more rent. We also completed -- we haven't closed on it, but we've eliminated the obligation. This was before not using these proceeds for the acquisition of the Haywood Quarry, which is an absolutely critical mining property adjacent or near adjacent to our Dayton operation that enables that mine plan to get to the finish line. And we…

Okay. Thank you very much, Corrado. And thank you, everyone, for joining us today. This concludes our webcast.

Thank you.