All right. Hello, everyone, and thank you for continuing to join us throughout the day here at the Lithum Partners Spring 2025 Investor Conference. Again, my name is Robert Blum, Managing Partner here at Lithum. Today we're welcoming Corrado De Gasperis, the Chief Executive Officer at Comstock, who will be taking us through the company's slide presentation. For those not familiar, Comstock trades on the NYSE American under the ticker symbol LODE. Corrado, let's jump right into it. The floor is all yours.
Thanks, Robert. Appreciate it very well. It's a pleasure to be here. I just want to state that I will be making some forward-looking statements. If we could attend to, you know, those guidelines, that would be wonderful. Overall, as you said, Comstock is an NYSE-listed company. Ticker symbol is LODE. We actually have three groupings of assets. I would say three businesses: Comstock Metals, Comstock Mining, and Comstock Real Estate. You know, we basically consolidated, you know, 12 sq mi of mineral properties in northern Nevada and then expanded into a remarkable metal recycling business, which is exploding as we speak in terms of growth. We also have a few investments that are technology-based. One in particular is a waste-to-fuel business, which we call Biolium Corps. So I'm going to touch on each one of those: metals, mining, and that one business as we go through this presentation.
That fuels business was previously a fully owned subsidiary of our company, but there was so much interest, so much strategic interest, so much investment channeling directly into that subsidiary that we recently separated those businesses, but we remain the substantial largest shareholder, you know, of that company. Just jumping into it, we are obviously a public company listed on the NYSE. We have a full, super competent independent board, but maybe just as importantly, we have fully dedicated management teams. At corporate, myself, Judd Merrill, Billy McCarthy handle most of what we would call the company-wide activities. That certainly includes interface and interlocuting with the investment community, capital markets, you know, and certain other activities that we would say are generic to the enterprise as a whole. However, each one of our businesses has dedicated leadership and dedicated teams.
That fuels business that I mentioned, we recently separated. Kevin Chrysler is the CEO, has a deep bench of management, which I'll share a little bit more with you later. Fortunato runs fully our metal recycling business, and that metal recycling business has the potential to be the largest silver mine, silver producer, for lack of a better word, in the United States. Certainly going to be the largest in Nevada in the reasonably near future. Judd, also with his extensive mining background, leads our mining portfolio. We have dedicated teams for each one of these businesses. For all intents and purposes, we're a metals and mining company. I'll take you through some of how we look at metals, how we look at mining, and what we think about it in the grand scheme, starting with this recycling business.
Comstock Metals takes waste solar panels and transfers and translates all of those materials into reusable materials. Some people are starting to call it urban mining, which we think is kind of a cool designation. The common tie of both Comstock Metals and mining businesses is these incredible precious metals that we have either, you know, in the mining district or extracting from these renewable products. Silver, by all stretches of the imagination, has been out of balance between supply and demand. For most of my last 15 years, there was more silver supply that, you know, coming out of the mines than was being, you know, used and demanded. The growth of industrial use of silver sort of steadily continued to increase until about three years ago when it exploded, primarily driven by new electrifications and even within new electrifications by solar panel deployments.
Right now, today, there's over 200 million ounces more demand than supply, and that number is growing rapidly as electrification continues to extrapolate around the world and certainly in the United States. We absolutely love the profile of silver demand, what it will mean going forward, certainly to the overall pricing dynamic. We literally take solar panels and recycle 100% of the materials, and we resell and reuse all of those materials. This small facility in this picture to the lower right is our three-shift fully operating facility, and this big, huge building to the front is where we will be expanding into before the end of this year. We have a 7,000 sq ft facility fully operating, you know, fully proven, and now permits have been extended to and waiting for final approval, in which case we will move to industry scale.
That industry scale will be 100,000 tons of production capacity per year, which represents well over 3 million panels per year processed. We believe that we're the only company that can scale to that size, and the reason for that is we have a fully automated, fully integrated industrial process that can do one panel every seven seconds. What's remarkable is that this market, which is in excess of 100,000 tons today, certainly will be a million within about four years. There is a monster market here. The market is end-of-life panels, going from 100,000-150,000 today to a million by 2030 to 10 million by 2050. That's just from what we know is deployed. How is this happening? These panels are supposed to last 25-30 years. They're only lasting somewhere between, on average, in our experience, 12-15, maybe 16 years.
There is a lot of panels coming out of the market a lot sooner than anybody expected. In our facility, we've proven that we can take these panels and that we can crush them. We can delaminate and decontaminate them. This is the most proprietary part of our process where we take the laminates, the plastics, the glues, the nasty, sticky contaminants that are so difficult to eradicate. We do it efficiently, we do it quickly, and we do it cleanly. We have full air quality control with no contaminating emissions, and we end up with clean aluminum to be used back in the production process, clean glass that can be used back into the production process, and then this mineral-rich fines that are primarily containing silver. I mentioned earlier that industry scale will do 3.3 million panels a year.
At an ounce per panel, that could represent 3.3 million ounces of silver production. The largest miner in Nevada produces a little over 4 million ounces of silver. With one facility, we'll move into the second position. With two facilities, we'll by far be the largest producer of silver in the state of Nevada. Our facility is fully up and running. Not only do we get paid to take the panels, we take the environmental concern from these utility companies, from these solar panel deployed companies. We process cleanly, and then we sell. We ship and sell 100% of the material. It's kind of odd in the sense that our suppliers pay us and our customers pay us. We get paid on the front end. We get paid on the back end. Those economics are extraordinary.
About $500 a ton for material coming in, about $200 a ton for material going out, $700 a ton, if you will, in revenue, and only about $150 of cost. That margin, that contribution, we're not talking about gross margin, we're talking about the bottom line, is over 80%. It is fast. One panel every seven seconds. We love what's happening in this precious metal market. Electrification drives silver demand, but we also have 12 sq mi of real estate, which was at one point the largest silver district in the United States. The Comstock Lode, which is our home, which is our brand, which is our legacy. About 10 years ago, we stopped mining and we started redeploying our assets into these new spaces, the recycling technologies, etc .
It was well, it served us well to pivot, you know, into recycling and into producing these metals from a different source because the junior miners have had it tough for about that period of time, you know. As silver prices hit $33 and as gold prices hit $3,300, we're starting to see the silver miners breaking out. We are very proud that we maintained all of our permits, that we maintained all of our infrastructure, and that we have a really wonderful high-grade series of resources that we can put back into production. We recently hired a CFO that comes from an extensive mining background and extraordinarily familiar, you know, with this district and with these assets. A second part of our plan certainly will be to advance these assets forward.
The cash flow profile from this one resource alone is in the hundreds of millions of dollars in just over, you know, five years of production. We already know what we have, but it seemingly just keeps getting better as these precious metal prices keep increasing. That is Comstock Metals and Mining.
As I mentioned at the beginning, just recently, we separated another one of our businesses because even though we spent the last four and a half years doing with what was called Comstock Fuels, the same as what we did with Comstock Metals, the external interest from companies like Marathon Petroleum and others was so high, and the inquiries to invest directly into the subsidiary were so strong that we agreed because of the capital profile being so significantly different, because the timeframe to get into production, you know, being so much longer than metals where we're already producing and revenue is already expanding rapidly, we decided that it was best served for both of these companies to separate. What happened was Comstock Fuels essentially became Biolium Corporation. Biolium is the brand of these waste-to-fuel materials that are extremely low carbon and extremely impactful in the energy space.
We have a fully dedicated team. I am the only member of the team that is in both companies. We have a Chief Executive Officer, a Chief Technology Officer, a Chief Engineer, and more running this company. This company's claim to fame is that when you look at taking waste biomass or any biomass for that matter, the industry standard is the ability to extract about 45 or 50 gasoline gallon equivalents per ton. If we just took the cellulose from woody biomass, we would do about 50 gasoline gallon equivalents per ton. What was missing, what was hidden in plain sight, was that the woody biomass has lignin. If you can take both the cellulose and the lignin, the entire lignocellulosic components of the biomass, you do not get 50 gasoline gallon equivalents. You do not get 100 gasoline gallon equivalents.
We're currently at 140 gasoline gallon equivalents, and this is the only company in the world that has proven it can liquefy lignin, stabilize the oil, and turn it into drop-in fuels. As I mentioned, Marathon Petroleum recently invested directly into this company. They also contributed their state-of-the-art cellulosic sugar-to-biofuel pilot facilities in Madison, Wisconsin. It is now our facility in Madison, Wisconsin, where we now have the ability to produce up to two barrels a week of these Biolium oils. What do these oils do? These oils can do anything that petroleum can do and, in fact, can feed right into and blend with petroleum.
They can also provide the oils that are identical and similar to vegetable oils, can blend and provide additional feedstocks into these refineries, but they can also take other industries like pulp and paper, which uses cellulose but disposes of the lignin; cane ethanol, which takes the sugar and the cane and disposes of the lignin. It can bolt on, it can integrate, and it can expand those business models to produce more and more fuel. It can diversify corn ethanol facilities, and it can also build and operate standalone facilities. In fact, we have not only the ability to take woody biomass and turn it into the highest yielding fuel equation on the planet, we also have the exclusivity to take purpose-grown woody biomass. A company called Hexas Biomass out of Washington State has granted us the exclusive rights to grow and use these materials in our system.
Why is that important? Because the renewable fuel industry is bottlenecked by feedstock. They don't have the ability to produce enough feedstock to literally fuel their refineries. If you look at soybeans, soybeans produce about two barrels per acre per year if you're trying to grow fuel. Corn produces about 10 barrels per acre per year. Hexas would produce a minimum of 100 barrels per acre per year. When combined with our technology unleashes, in our opinion, the first biofuel solution that's actually industry scale and can globalize. We are very, very excited about what we have, and we're building our first facility in Oklahoma. Oklahoma has granted us not only $3 million to pick them as the first state to host our biorefinery, but they've also allocated $152 million of tax-free municipal bonds to support the financing of Biolium's first facility.
Oklahoma could not be better positioned from an oil and gas state. They are not only one of the leading infrastructured oil and gas states with pipelines that interconnect throughout the country, but they're also the third largest renewable fuel, renewable energy state, you know, in the country. We love Oklahoma. Oklahoma seems to love us. They're giving us tremendous support. We're about to select our first site. It is almost certain with Hexas and that sort of biomass equation behind us that we'll have many, many sites in Oklahoma. We have built not only an incredible project pipeline in the United States, but we've partnered with companies all around the world.
We've also licensed our technology to three projects in Australia, a project in Vietnam, a project in Pakistan, and we've built an innovation network from Renfuel's labs in Sweden to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado to MIT and Wyoming, where we've literally built the world's leading lignocellulosic scientific and innovation capacity. We already have the leading solution in the world in terms of yields, cost, and profit performance, but we haven't stopped there because the innovations that we're working on include shattering the blend wall for sustainable aviation fuel, reducing the cost to get to parity with petroleum. It's unlike anything anyone's ever attempted to or proven is possible in the renewable biofuel arena. We are proud of that network. We are proud of our partners. They speak very, very highly of the system that we've assembled and the technologies that we've integrated. That is really Comstock.
In a nutshell. We're going to be the leading recycler of solar panels in the country. Ultimately, we don't see why it wouldn't be in the world. We have one of the leading mineral districts in the country, certainly as it pertains to silver. From a metals and mining perspective, we're Nevada-based. From an investment perspective, you know, renewable fuels is one of the largest, it's literally the single largest standalone asset on our balance sheet. We believe every one of these businesses, certainly the renewable metals, certainly the renewable fuels, is at least a billion to multiple billions in valuation potential. The mining assets, as I mentioned, have hundreds of millions of cash flow perspective.
Now that we've separated the fuels business, we're reentering the capital markets and looking to talk to people who are really interested in these resources and really interested in the growth profile, not just revenue growth, not just metal production growth, but cash flow growth, 2026 profile from what is now a mature and expanding operation.
All right, Corrado, thank you so much for the presentation here. So many developments taking place here, all sort of rapid fire in many ways. To anyone out there watching, and if you'd like to learn more, connect perhaps with management or speak with me here, you can give me, send me an email at blumblum@lithumpartners.com. Again, you can also visit our website or stay linked, connected to us through LinkedIn to learn more about the company and find videos like this one here.
Corrado, thank you so much for your time and participation in today's conference. Greatly appreciate it.
Wonderful. Thank you, Robert.
Wonderful. All right. Thanks, everyone. Hope you're having a great conference here and a great rest of your day.