Good morning, and thank you for joining Comstock Inc.'s Business Update Webinar. I'm Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations. Joining me today are Corrado De Gasperis, Comstock's Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Judd Merrill, Comstock's Chief Financial Officer, and Fortunato Villamagna, President of Comstock Metals. After their prepared remarks, we will take questions. We received several 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 everyone to this sort of interim or intermediate update. We did an offering last week that really prompted a number of questions that we thought would be really appropriate to address on this call with this group. As you see, we've got myself, Judd, and Fortunato here. I'll actually go through the presentation materials myself, just for expedience, but when we get to the Q&A, you know, Judd and Fort will participate, you know, as appropriate, as we go through the rest of that. I do want to highlight a couple of the folks that are on this slide, because one of the things you'll hear in our update is that we received all of our permits from the Nevada Department of Environmental Protection.
We're gonna give you some color on the extraordinary effort and the extraordinary outcome that resulted from that. One of the extraordinary outcomes is we were able to hire Kayla Alm from the department, and she was one of the leaders in the Sustainable Materials Bureau, which is really the bureau that handles these first-of-a-kind, for us, recycling permits. So the team is strengthened, the team is expanded, you know, and we're on our way. But before we get into the metals update, which is the backbone of this presentation, I do want to address that we did close last Friday on an absolutely remarkable equity offering. We went out to raise $30 million, and those proceeds were to be used for metals in three distinct categories, which we're gonna elaborate on through this presentation.
First and foremost, we want to immediately file our permit for facility # 2 and immediately thereafter, order the equipment for facility # 2. That, plus storage, is about $13 million, consistent with what we're just about finished spending on facility # 1. We also want to accelerate site selections, and we've already done so, but we want to keep going. Sites 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, not to build out the facilities prematurely, but to secure the sites, secure the storage, and start the permitting process with Kayla and the team. Thirdly, and remarkably, we've accelerated the development. I would say Fortunato led the acceleration of development of a domestic refining solution that will take the tailings and produce critical metals here in the United States.
It's $13 million for facility #2 , $5 million to expand our team, our resources, our platform for the rest of the sites, for recycling. $10 million to invest in a final technical, economic, engineered outcome for a domestic refining solution. So that's what we went out with, with $30 million. We ended up upsizing, as I'm sure all of you are aware, to $50 million, because we were overwhelmed with demand, at least 5x, from some of the best institutional investors in the country. So we'll talk about that in a little more detail, but the end result was that we raised, net $46.5 million after fees. We add that to our existing cash position. That puts us well over $60 million cash in the bank to pursue the things that we are talking about.
I know that some people had asked about my comments previously about being fully funded. The first offering achieved three things, and we're square on with those three things. It fully funded the first facility. It eliminated and extinguished all of our debt obligations, such that, you know, this is what our footnote looks like. We have zero debt, but more importantly, we extinguished half a dozen other non-debt obligations. Balance sheet has never been stronger, and in doing that, we issued 18.2 million additional shares to get our total shares outstanding to 71,731,000. 18 million is missing from this sheet, but from what we last reported at the end of October, and I'll fix this, we had 51,264,247 shares outstanding.
We did use the ATM toward the end of December and only the end of December and the beginning of January, for about a four-week period. We issued 1.4 million shares, an average price of just a hair below $4 a share. Our directors also, as we announced, agreed to take three years' worth of stock-based compensation that they had put off because of lower share prices and empathy for that issue. But they agreed to take that compensation all in stock. So we sit with 71.3 million shares outstanding. If the bankers exercise their allotment, we would be a hair over 74 million. The more meaningful update here is that we added an incredible base.
Many of our existing institutional investors, I would say 65%-70% from the offering in August, invested more in a bigger way, stronger, to see the accelerations that I just mentioned. We think this is extraordinarily accretive, but we don't think it's intuitive on the surface. So I'd like to take you through what's changed for the better in this business plan and in this business model. When we look at what we plan to do in metals in 2025, we're 7 for 7. We're just finishing up the seventh one now, and I know that some people certainly would like to see the seventh facility up and running, but it's on schedule. We got the permits. We increased and continue to increase our customer base. We selected and secured 2 more sites. Those have been announced. We expanded our billings.
We guided that we were going to go from just under $500,000 of billings in 2024 to over $3.5 million, 8x. Obviously, that's a big increase when you're dealing with a little demo facility to over $3.5 million. We exceeded that, not by a lot, but we exceeded it. $3.51 million. Outstanding. And what we were hoping we would get to, and we didn't think we would, was advancing a solution to refine these tailings into critical refined metals and increase. We did that work. We did that work in an accelerated way in the fourth quarter, and we're going to talk about that as well. But we are, we have procured, we are deploying, and we are readying and assembling the plant and the equipment for the first industry-scale facility in Silver Springs, Nevada.
It was scheduled to be commissioned in Q1. We're right on schedule. It was scheduled to be up and operating in Q2 of this year. We're right on schedule. We couldn't be more excited about that facility coming online. And one of the reasons that we described for our excitement was that we have the only zero landfill solution, that we were certified by the industry as the only company with a zero landfill solution, that we recover all of the materials, including all of the aluminum, all of the glass, and these element-rich, these metal-rich tailings. We used to say silver-rich. We're modifying our vernacular. Silver is exploding. When we showed this chart in August, it was rising. We commented how it went from the high teens to the high twenties to the mid-thirties.
Most of our economics were based on the mid-30s. We're in the mid-80s today, and I'm going to shed some light on what that means, because this gap between supply and demand that we highlighted in August, that we exemplified, that we marketed, was meaningful to us, has become much, much more meaningful than we imagined and quicker. So what's it we do? For our customers, we terminate a liability. We completely, expediently, and fully eliminate an environmental liability for our customers, and they pay us upfront to do that. We have signed up almost every major utility, certainly in the Southwest region of the United States, but surprisingly, across the country, in Georgia, in Ohio, in Florida. We are now focused on maximizing the recovery of these scarce metals here in the United States.
Most of you know, and I won't dwell on the things that we do better than anybody else, is we fully, completely, and cleanly eliminate the contaminants. We depolymerize, deconstruct, and eliminate cleanly the laminates, plastics, glues, polymers that come with these materials. If you don't do that, you will be a hazardous waste generator. Why? Because if the plastics and glue stick to the metal, so will some of these other materials, cadmium, lead, et cetera. Very bad. You now have generated a cost and a liability instead of generated an asset and a salable material. But we do it with extreme efficiency. Our totally variable costs are based on a very small and efficient amount of electricity and natural gas, less than 7% of our revenues. But the thing that's most exciting is we do it expediently.
We can-- We have designed and are deploying a system that can take a panel every 7 seconds. By being able to take a panel every 7 seconds, we can process millions of panels in one production line per year. This is the variable, right, that allows us to scale. The first variable, eliminate all contaminants, differentiator. Second variable, extremely and ridiculously low variable cost, differentiator. Low capital, didn't say that before, differentiator.... But scaling is what our customers need. They have a huge dilemma. These things are coming to end of life a full decade before anybody made plans for it. And so the ability to handle millions of panels is fundamentally a prerequisite at this stage of the market's growth. And these permits that we got to do it, it took over a year.
We buffered the plan, so we're on schedule, but it took longer than we thought, and one of the reasons was Nevada, which is the beachhead for the Southwest region. Nevada, which is the primary location to service these panels from California, Arizona, and here at home in Nevada, put us to the highest standard of regulatory compliance. Basically telling us if we generate waste, we don't qualify for the permit. So as much as we like to think of a zero-waste solution, the fact that we generate no wastewater, we use no chemicals, the floors are clean. There's not one ounce of material that we've ever sent to a landfill or that's sitting somewhere because we don't know what to do with it, doesn't exist. Every sack that we have, we ship and we sell. We thought that was a nice differentiator.
We thought that was a nice, positive thing to talk about. In Nevada, it's a prerequisite. So we believe we're two years ahead, maybe more than any competitor, and we don't see anybody showing up. And we're sitting primarily in the market that represents over half of the U.S. So not to confuse it, those permits just permitted building number one, this huge industrial-scale facility that you see at the front part of this picture. We've been operating that small facility in the back for two years. So we've been doing this for two years, and that's what the facility looks like today. Parking lot is absolutely full of panels. The building inside is full of panels. We've, we've made some room now because with the equipment, you know, being commissioned, but trucks are coming in every week.
The most important thing about that small facility is that we prove that we can take every single type of panel, any panel that we've got our hands on, industrial, retail, crystalline, monocrystalline, polycrystalline, cylindrical, thin film, the ones that our competitors are telling their customers they can't handle, we take them. We don't disassemble them, we don't move them around. We shred them, we clean them, we reprocess them fast. What is the first major update that I want to talk to you about is that we're consistently and steadily getting the equivalent of $500 a ton of tipping fee to exterminate that liability from our customers. But then we're selling the aluminum for another $125 equivalent a ton. We're selling the glass $10-$20 a ton. It's good. Got other designs on what to do with the glass coming up later.
But these metal tailings, getting another $125 a ton. So the original economics that we conveyed to everyone was $500 a ton coming in, a little over $250 a ton going out, $750 a ton, you know, against a cost of $150 all in. We mean all in. Fortunato's in there, sales and marketing is in there, accounting is in there, certainly plants, operations, logistics are in there. That's our all-in cost. The variable component of that cost is only about $3.5 million, maybe $4 million.
So this plant, if it was running full and we won't run it at 100%, I'm gonna show you a more realistic utilization in a minute, but the simplest math that we can convey to people is $12 million of CapEx can generate almost $60 million a year. Understanding that that's 3.3 million panels in a market, that in 2030, we expect to be 33 million panels. In a market that today in the United States, based on our last demographic update, is 1.3-1.4 billion panels deployed. 33 million panels in 2030 coming out of the market is the tip of a massive iceberg of end-of-life panels. And it gets bigger and bigger as we look forward, and we're just talking about the United States.
If you look at the world, it's easily 8x-10x the US number. 8x-10 x the US number. So when we look at the map and we say: Where are these 1.3 billion, 1.4 billion panels? We see every one of the major deployments that we plotted across the country, and we size these plots by age, so the fatter the circle, the older the panels. You can quickly see that California leads the race, and when you add Nevada and Arizona, you're at least 50% of the market. At least 50%. Between now and 2030, if our current customer base gave us, let's say, 40,000 panels this year, let's say 35,000 panels this year, critically important to know that at 20% utilization, we're profitable.
But let's say it's 35, 40 this year, we're just getting started. Those same customers, based on their replacement schedules, would be at 350,000-400,000. We are, we are signing master service agreements with the market, and the market's looking to grow 10x. And our customers are where you would expect them to be, in the Southwest region. Why? Because we have the beachhead in Nevada, and no one's getting a permit in Nevada in the next 2 years, mark my words. They haven't even shown up. The closest competitor that we would see actually recycling panels was in Texas. Guess what they did? They shut their doors. They called us and asked us if we could take some material from them. We laughed. We didn't really laugh, we were professional.
So, when we plot out where we want our sites to be, and this is outdated, by the way, we built this based on 2023 data. When we look at what's been deployed in 2024 and 2025, you guys would be shocked. It's an alarming rate of solar deployment. You wouldn't know it from the political headwinds. Solar is being deployed like there's no tomorrow. But this is critical. Site number one is in place. Site number two, we've identified the site. We're gonna file the permits as soon as next week. We're gonna order the equipment in March. This is one of the reasons that we prompted to... We were fully funded for site number one. There's no hiccup, and there's no caveat. We're on schedule. We've got to get site number two. Why? I'm explaining why.
Because we're winning in the market, we're winning in the market share, and we wanna, we wanna extend our lead. We don't want to maintain our lead, we want to extend our lead, because with metal prices moving, competition is probably gonna come faster than we were originally anticipating. So site number one, Silver Springs, Northern Nevada. Site number two, just outside of Vegas, Southern Nevada. We put a conveyance station, a prep station in California. That was in response to the market. That was in response to our California customers. And it also helps us with efficiencies, it helps us with loading, it helps us with preparation before those, those panels come to Nevada. We also had a customer-driven site selection in Ohio, and we know where we want to put seven of these recycling facilities.
We already know what states we're targeting and where we're site selecting. And part of the uses of this offering is to increase our capacity to be able to do this faster. But maybe the most remarkable thing, maybe the most remarkable thing that you're gonna hear from us today is that in late November, you know, Fortunato dedicated the capacity for dealing with this refining solution. And I'm gonna explain two things from this slide. The first, as you saw in that economic slide, is these silver-rich tailings have a lot more than silver in them, as you can see on the right-hand side of the slide. And this $125 a ton that you saw me profile in the simple economic summary was based on silver that was well below $40 an ounce. It's based on a less than ideal offtake agreement.
Obviously, we make a lot of money on it, but a less than ideal offtake agreement, where we only get a percentage of the silver value. Often it's below 50% because we have to deduct all the transportation costs. We have to deduct refining costs. We don't refine in the United States. It doesn't, it doesn't really exist in any way, shape, or form. All these metals go to Asia. U.S. government came out and said, "Can anybody take industrial tailings and refine critical metals and keep them here in the United States?" We, we were thinking we would get to this in June or July, when facility one was up and running, when everybody saw it turning profitable, we would turn our attention to the next priority. We couldn't do that.
Couldn't do that for two reasons: government saying, "This is strategically critical, and we'll help you." And then secondly, silver prices are $85 an ounce. At $60 an ounce, with that less than suboptimal arrangement with the Asians, okay, we're not getting $125 a ton, we're getting $375 a ton. What? Yeah. We're getting another $250 a ton above and beyond what we guided just because of the metal prices. That's $20 million-$25 million more dollars per facility. Can't wait for facility 2. File the permit next week, order the equipment in March. We need to get it up and running. As much as because of the economics that it's gonna bring us, we also need to focus on a refining solution because of the economics we're leaving on the table.
What are we leaving on the table? Equally, that number in the silver that we're not recovering. And then what about the copper? What about the gallium and the tellurium, depending on the type of panels we're processing? What about the silicon metal? Well, silicon's not that valuable, Corrado. Yeah, it is, because it's most of the mass balance that we're sitting on. It's incredibly valuable. But even if we just bumped it, even if we just bumped it by the $250 a ton, then, you know, let's, let's look at 90% utilization, not a 100% utilization, not practical. You're not throwing off $60 million. You're throwing off at least $75 million, maybe $80 million per facility. We must corner this U.S. market. We must go faster. We're going faster for the right reasons.
We're going faster because we got the right, best type of permits, because we're in the right, best location, because we have the right, best technology, and because we're winning the best customers. I'd rather be criticized for going too fast than going too slow. So, you know, we raised an additional $30 million. There were some also criticism because when we filed our last 10-Q, people saw that we advanced some money to Sierra Springs. So I just wanna address that, and then we're gonna go to Q&A. We did advance some money to Sierra Springs. We didn't have to, but I mentally justified it because the overallotment gave us another $4.5 million from the August offering. But it wasn't done out of convenience. It, it really wasn't done opportunistically.
It was done because we made some significant progress in securing access to power for those properties in Silver Springs. It was done because some of the biggest companies, all the way from you know, from horizontal construction to hyperscale development to off-grid power, had said, "Wait a minute, if you have access to power, we can do something meaningful here." And so, and so based on that, additional capital, based on some additional capital that you just heard about coming from the ATM, we put some additional capital. But we are structuring a transaction that I can't get into the details, which frustrates me and wants me to bite my lip, because all of the questions and concerns that people are gonna have about that capital allocation will be answered completely, definitively, absolutely, and to extreme positive end.
Just to summarize, we're working on that transaction. We expect something in February, without a doubt. Judd's also working on a number of inquiries with our mining assets. I wanna leave you with one thought: at reasonable recoveries, let's just say 92%, one of the solar recycling facilities could generate 1.3 million ounces of silver. Two, then, would generate 2.6 million ounces of silver per year in Nevada. Our Dayton mine , which is now looking incredibly lucrative because of the gold and silver that's in the ground, has 2.6 million ounces of silver in situ. In seven or eight years, we could mine that 2.6 million ounces. If we're really, really good, we'll get 55%-60% recovery.
There's no scenario where we're putting money into hard rock mining as compared to a solar panel recycling facility, when that's the contrast. Generate 2.6 million ounces a year from two facilities every year, forever and ever, with no depletion, or spend 8 years trying to get 60% of 2.6 million ounces. And by the way, it's very, very profitable. So we've got some very serious, very significant, very capable mining companies/executives very seriously talking to us about these mining assets. And I can tell you, we've gone through the whole array from 2024 to 2025 to now early 2026, in terms of the quality of inquiries that have come in, and it's changed exponentially, obviously, because of the metal prices. So Zach, with that, I would love nothing more than to go into Q&A.
As I said, Judd and Fortunato, happy to participate and engage in which and whatever questions.
Thank you, Corrado. As I mentioned at the beginning of the webcast, we received several questions prior to the webcast, and I can see we have a number of additional questions coming through Zoom. Gentlemen, our first question is: what visibility is there on the pipeline of solar panels that you will have access to once the commercial facility comes online in a few months?
So I'll give the first stab at that, and Fort, you can add some color. It is literally the thing that we have the least visibility to relative to everything else. Okay? Relative to everything else. That doesn't mean we don't have visibility, that doesn't mean, you know, we're not managing, you know, along that visibility. But the way I would characterize it is, in 2024, our customers were trying to define the problem. They have end-of-life problem that as an enterprise, as a company, they weren't prepared for. In 2025, we saw them get their arms, at least in many cases, around the problem. They didn't have people, they didn't have budgets, they didn't have clarity on their priorities. In both cases, 2024 and 2025, we were directly engaged in working with them on all of this, right?
We've been running a small facility for two years. In 2026, some of the more sophisticated customers have established resources and have even established budgets. So every week that goes by, every month that goes by, we get more visibility to their replacement schedules. It's very difficult for us to see past three or four or five months with real predictability, but the order flow grows every week, every month. The predictability improves every week, every month. And just using what we know is out there in the Southwest region, for example, we feel very confident, you know, that getting to our breakeven operating rate and then ending the year growing from that, you know, is in our line of sight, right? Fort, I don't know if you maybe want to give a little more color on that.
Oh, you're on mute. Sorry.
Just to recap on the visibility aspect, you have to understand, exiting COVID, this industry, in terms of recycling solar panels, by and large, didn't exist. The customers themselves are evolving in their preparation for their own internal recycling activities, allocating funds, allocating resources to that. That presents some difficulties even for the customers in projecting out. But they have all undertaken activities related to creating internal teams to now manage this liability. Our focus has been to participate on those teams as fully as we can, and the way we will get our insight is by helping them in the planning process. And as we move forward over the next few quarters, that is gonna strengthen, and we will get more information.
But the reality of the situation is, those panels are out there. They've been out there for 20 years or more than 20 years. They have to come off the racks because they're generating less electricity, or they're damaged or some other reason, and they have nowhere to go. You can't stockpile them, you can't store them, you can't really throw them in the landfill. So that back end of it is extremely positive for us.
Yeah. I would add one maybe anticipated question and add another thought to that was, you know, we don't see anybody that has the capacity to scale that the way we can, right? So when you're at the front end of this process and someone has 1,000 panels or 10,000 panels or even 80,000 panels, like, we took an RWE order last year of, yeah, I mean, a lot of people can probably make out as if they can handle that kind of volume, but when people have hundreds of thousands and millions of panels, where's the capacity? And so, you know, originally it was landfills. I mean, that's getting closed off very soundly, you know, especially in states that are properly classifying these materials as universal waste, which is hazardous.
We saw some odd activity of shredders just shredding the stuff and sending the shredded materials overseas. That's a no-no, right? Those people that are exploiting other categories of material, in other words, not properly classifying them as universal, classifying them as nothing or not otherwise classified, the government is shut down. In a number of instances recently, we've seen the government shut down. Whatever the government's motivation is, you know, environmental or frankly, keeping the metals home, we're all for it, right? We're seeing it, and it's getting clearer and clearer. All of that is evolving in front of us. There needs to be a little patience, but you know, we already have about 6,000 tons of material sitting there waiting to be processed.
So, you know, we're gonna be able to get this thing up and running, and processing at nice levels almost right out of the chute. Zach?
Yes, thank you for that. What agreements are in place to support the pipeline?
So we sign typically what we call master service agreements. We have master service agreements with major solar utility companies across the U.S. Ford, do you want to just give a little color as to, you know, what those agreements are? They're not exclusive agreements. They're not take or pay agreements, right? They're really established for the absolute clearest and easiest way for the customer to interface with us, predefining all the major variables.
Yeah, as you said, Corrado, we strive to develop master service agreements with customers. They are really roadmaps to how we work together. They're roadmaps to what we deliver as a service to the customer, and basically not guaranteed take or pay contracts, but we work every day to meet the customer demands and requirements, make sure we have fully satisfied customers, that they're receiving value for the service we provide, and that is what's developing those relationships and those agreements. Over time, as the industry further matures, those agreements will turn into guaranteed contracts, but for the time being, we're building towards there. Again, with us being the only option they have for a true recycling-...
Partner, not one that offshores waste or that type of thing, but they can count on us from A to Z in terms of recovering and recycling the panels that they generate.
It might, it might, it might be helpful, like, to, you know, like I just thinking about the process we've gone through with so many customers. It's not a paper exercise, right? It's not a negotiated PO type agreement, right? These, these master service agreements typically come with us being fully audited, site visits, channel checks for where our offtake is going, channel checks with our regulators. We were caught off guard a couple times by our customers directly calling our regulators, you know. So the diligence that goes into qualifying us, you know, validating the zero landfill solution, and then, and then constructing these master service agreement, which includes logistics, which include pricing, which include volumes, you know, it actually takes quite a bit of work, to build, right?
So we sort of say, "Oh, yeah, we got all these master service agreements," as if, like, you know, we're just pumping them off the desk, but it's more—it's much more engaged. The supply chain is much more engaged than that.
Okay, thank you for that. The next couple of questions we have are on the tipping fees. With the current tipping fees, who sets these fees? The market or regulators? Are they consistent across all states? What do you project tipping fees to be in the next five to ten years?
Fort.
Yeah, as in terms of setting the tipping fees, it follows a standard sales process. Look, the customer has a need, they have a liability, we remove that liability. Quite often, we go on to their sites and physically take down panels and palletize them and move them. We provide a number of services that allows them to do the right thing every time. There's a value assigned to that. That's a negotiated number. But by and large, our tipping fees have remained virtually unchanged since we started. We do have some variability depending on volume, scale, size, longevity of the master service agreement, but the fees have been fairly robust in recognition that they do have a problem.
They can't just throw these in the trash bin, and there's an inherent value in that. Long term, there's always some erosion as your business evolves, but I don't think that'll be a substantial number.
Yeah, it really ties back to what good alternatives do they have, right? And, by and large, you know, our top customers are very strict, you know, with their environmental compliance requirements. There's real liability there, as Fortunato said. You know, some segments of the market are just, you know, working really hard to find, you know, alternatives, okay? But there just aren't any real good ones.
Okay, our next question is also looking towards the future. Following the expansion of the facilities across the United States, are there any plans to expand Comstock Metals internationally, or to license the tech for use by international partners?
We've had this question before. I could sort of handle it. The focus is extraordinarily sharp right now in the United States, right? Cornering, getting two facilities in Nevada, which this offering accelerated, you know. You know, it might not feel like it's accelerating. As I think about this discussion a little bit, we always wanted, right, to put the first facility up and immediately go after the second facility. What we learned was the permit process for the first one took a little longer. We've gotten some really strong assurances that because it was first of a kind, that that had to be what it was. We're happy with the outcome, not so much the timing, but okay. But the second one will be faster.
But, you know, first one was like 13 months-14 months. Typical is more like 7 months or 8 months. Well, it turns out that the equipment lead time, which we thought was about 5 months-6 months, turned out to be 7 months or 8 months as well, right? So with that information, plus the successes we're having in the market, we needed to accelerate facility #2 , you know. So I just wanna make that, you know, reassert that point. But we also want to identify and secure, beyond even Ohio, 3, 4, 5 more sites.
The ideal way to do that in the US is secure a site that can immediately handle storage, immediately meaning permit within a few months, that can provide some efficacy to the network through that, brings in cash, but then is expandable into processing. So that's, that's second part of this offering. Third part of the offering, which is not what the question is, but I'm getting there, is get a refining solution. The beauty of that-...
cartoon that I showed you is not just that Fortunato and a handful of partners, handful of partners who have the capacity to bench test, have handful of partners who have the capacity to pilot test, handful of partners that have capacity to even do some smelting, to get us to full feasibility by the end of this year, so we can start thinking about a demo refinery in 2028, 2027, and then industrial scale, 2028, 2029. So that, that's the US domination. Now, we've been approached by Europe, we've been approached by India, we've been approached by Australia, we've even been approached by the Middle East. And the constant feedback that we're getting is, we don't have a solution that can scale anywhere near the size that yours can.
So that's another really important validation to us, and we are very much open to those types of ventures, to extrapolating our solution outside of the United States. But there has to be some semblance of control that, you know, it's a balanced, reasonable semblance of control, but it's a need that we must ensure, and it has not been our priority, right? I think that once facility #1 , which we're now months away, once facility #1 is up and running, our credibility, our leverage, our capacity to do those things, all of the above, very positive for Comstock Metals, will go up dramatically.
Thank you, Corrado. We have received several questions about the possible refining process, so thank you for that. And now looking towards some of our strategic investments-
Before we do that-
Could you please-
You wanna spend another minute-
Yeah
... just on, you know, the relative maturity of the extraction, separation, and recovery processes that you sort of amalgamated, I don't know if that's the right word to use, right? But you know, that you've designed and, your relative sense of, you know, its feasibility and your relative sense of the capital requirements around, a U.S.-based... 'Cause sometimes when you say U.S.-based refining, people think dirty, they think pollution, they think pyrolytic, they think, you know, EPA no-no, they think billions of dollars. I don't... That's not us, so I just, maybe you can-
Right.
Follow on that.
Look, the approach we've taken to the refining step is really broken down into 3 or 4, what we call unit operations. There's obviously an extraction process where you get the metals from the matrix, which is mostly crushed glass from the solar panels. Once you've extracted those metals, and that is an activity in and of itself, that activity has been well worked in the U.S. in other applications. There's clear technology. The TRL level of that activity is fairly high, at least 4 or 5, if not 6. So that first step is well defined. We are rejigging it to meet this product line and our requirements, but it is not sort of state-of-the-art R&D that has a high probability of failure. So that's a very solid step.
The second part or the second unit operation is once you recover these metals, and there's probably a total of roughly 10, depending on the panel type, model, et cetera, mother nature doesn't separate those metals for you. They come along generally as a grouping, in terms of their chemical properties, so there's a separation step that has to happen. Again, metal separation and solution has been around for a long, long time, well defined as well. We need to modify the embodiment to meet our needs, but that is also a well, a well-defined process.
Once you've separated the metals, converting them into a sellable product, so our product management team can find markets for them, whether you convert them to other salts, whether you convert them to oxides, whether you recover the pure metal through various other processes, that is also well defined. I mean, one of the applications we're looking at is literally centuries old, well-defined U.S. businesses that make the products and the components for that. So overall, we've basically taken some well-defined, well-established technologies, rejigged them to meet our needs. Therefore, the overall TRL level is considerably higher than just a development program.
Right. Excellent. Our goal is to, you know, get the most value in the right sequence, right? So, you know, the process will be defined based on getting the most value of X metal, most value of Y metal, most value of Z metal, and we'll just keep going and going until we get that process nailed down. Hopefully, by the end of this year, you know, it'll be well defined, engineered, economically assessed.
Thank you. We're coming up on just about 10 minutes before the top of the hour, and we do have a question about people would like an update on Bioleum and the progress that has been made.
Yeah, you know, I'm happy to do that. So, and we'll probably provide more of a deeper dive on Bioleum come the quarterly that... This is like an interim update. Normally, at the end of February, somewhere around the end of February, we file our 10-K, and we'll do the deeper dive. But I'm extremely excited to have acquired fully RenFuel. We have three people now in Sweden with a lab, but all of the IP is directly and completely owned, you know, by the corporation. Just as, you know, I wanna say, if not more, I don't wanna be disrespectful to RenFuel, but the Hexas acquisition is another game changer. Both of these technologies are critical prerequisites to creating something extraordinary. So that was all fully completed and integrated.
We had to update our business plan to include those things, Hexas more so than RenFuel, 'cause RenFuel was already being licensed, and it really was just some economic changes to our benefit. But, Hexas changed the game and the platform dramatically. So we integrated that into our plans. We updated our plans. We've now hired an investment banker, and we are ready to relaunch, you know, the Series A. So we had originally thought we would do that much quicker. That's, that's frank and a fact, but, but for, I think, the right reasons, you know, it, part of it was integrating the Madison facility and, and the investment that brought over with it from Marathon, RenFuel, Hexas. But we're locked and loaded and very excited to get that Series A done.
I think that's what people are most, you know, interested in, in waiting for. We couldn't feel better about it, so it's progressing on its own timeline, and I think it was probably good to get all those other prerequisites done beforehand. The team is built out. It's stronger. And we have a number of monetization opportunities that come even before, you know, we fully integrate the technology and are producing, you know, barrels of oil, you know, from a TRL 6 facility and expanding to a TRL 7 facility. We will have revenue opportunities, not the least of which is coming out of Hexas now to talk about, but we'll have to get into more detail about that later.
Okay, thank you for that, Corrado. Several investors would like to receive an update on the Sierra Springs Opportunity Fund, as well as our other land and property assets-
Yep.
- including mining.
That's just a quick repeat of what I said earlier. We have a line of sight to power. Power was the bottleneck. Because of that line of sight to power, sophisticated, capable, credible third parties are engaged with us. That is also the reason why we allocated some capital to it, but it's gonna be a much bigger, much clearer, much final view of Sierra Springs. I think there's been some criticism about, you know, it's out there, we don't have good visibility, Corrado has some ownership. All that's gonna be resolved here very positively for everyone involved. And with the mining assets I mentioned, it's almost the identical thing for a different reason.
Because the precious metal prices in that case, rather than because of the debottlenecking of power, we're getting much more serious engagement, you know, on some aspect of monetizing these mining assets. So, I feel like, you know, putting a timeline out there will only kill me because I've done it 6 x, and, you know, even though, you know, there's specific reasons for why things didn't go the way we originally hoped, we immediately addressed those reasons. You know, when the power bottleneck came up, you know, we focused on the power bottleneck. So, I think that there's substantive reason to believe that we will get much more productive outcomes of both those asset groupings. Maybe not. I really think we will.
Corrado, several investors have asked if you yourself or the other directors or the management team will be adding shares, LODE shares, anytime soon?
Very good question. So I think people at this point appreciate the disclosures will be even clearer, you know, in this 10-K, just 'cause the 10-K requires more extensive disclosure. But the metals team, led by Fortunato, you know, the fuels team, you know, led by a really, really strong founders group, have a lot of equity in those subsidiaries, okay? So that, that's something that maybe sometimes is missed, so I only emphasize it to say, like, the skin in the game concept here is, is, is probably one layer below and much deeper than anybody appreciates. It's very strong. But we just increased the ownership guidelines, you know, for directors and officers at the corporate level, right?
That will result certainly in more buying, you know, from me and Judd, you know, and you're already seeing increased ownership, you know, from the directors, and they've also made inquiries about buying, you know. And I'll be honest, like, I'm trying to get as much disclosure out on this call as possible to see if we can be lifted from the blackout before we file a 10-K. We'll see if our attorneys concur with that, but that's what we're trying to do.
Okay, thank you for that, Corrado. We are coming up on time, and I think we've covered all of the important questions. If we did not get to your question, please send it to ir@comstockinc.com, and we'll do our best to respond 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. Corrado, before we wrap up, please give us some final thoughts.
Just a couple things. First of all, there were a lot of questions that came in since Thursday. We tried to the best of our ability to make sure that questions that came in today and then were covered here. We know that some of them may not have been, so to Zach's point, we will respond to all those specific questions. I think they're all within the context or the umbrella of what we just talked about here on this call, so that's very good. And then we look forward to, I think it's gonna be about three weeks, you know, finalizing the annual audit, finalizing the filing of the 10-K, and giving you even more substantive update.
We're planning the annual meeting this year in later May, and that will also accommodate, you know, tours, you know, of the processing facility in Silver Springs. So a lot of exciting stuff happening in the next couple of three months.
Thank you, Corrado. That concludes Comstock's business update. Thank you all for joining us.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, thank you.