Foremost is James Robertson from Donald Corrado, who's our oversight inspector of the election. Jeff Michael from Assure CPA, our accounting firm. Both are in attendance here with us today. Also from the company, I wanted to introduce Judd Merrill, our Chief Financial Officer, Matt Bieberly, Chief Accounting Officer, and Zach Spencer, who's our Treasurer and Corporate Secretary. One of the great things about having these AGM meetings is a chance for us as the management and the directors, and the chance for you as our shareholders to interact and intermingle. Following the completion of this specific AGM, there will be two other presentations we'll deliver.
Corrado will lead on the discussion of corporate strategy and also talk about 2026 critical objectives, including the sale of our mining assets, advancement and monetization of our Silver Springs land, power, and water portfolio, and also an overview, important topic for all of us, Comstock Metals. We'll have a question and answer period following Corrado's presentation. Please hold your questions till he's finished with that. I wanted to also welcome and acknowledge some other long-term great friends of Comstock who are with us here today. If you ladies and gentlemen would like to stand up or wave, that'd be great. Tom Prutzman, Pete Heitzman, and Bruce McGuire, all three long-term Comstock investors and local investors. Their support in the community has been outstanding. Been with us a long time, and it's a shareholder group we probably appreciate the most. Thank you all.
Additionally, we have two folks, Mary Beth West and Dan Schor, with us today who are co-investors both in Comstock itself and in SSOF, which we'll talk about later on this morning. Dan and Mary Beth, thank you again. Again, welcome to the meeting. We'd like to have a fair, informative, and constructive meeting, and very much appreciate your cooperation in observing certain rules that will provide fair opportunity, equal opportunity for everybody to ask questions and to get the most out of our presentation. In line with that, if you have questions, during the business of this AGM, the first part of our meeting, please address them to me, the chair, and when I recognize you'll be able to ask a question. If you wish to ask a question, put your hand up, please. Wait to be recognized.
When recognized, state your name and the fact that you are a shareholder. If you're acting as a proxy, please so state. Name the shareholder you are representing, that would be great, and we'll try to get to as many questions as we can. Please don't interrupt others when they're speaking. Try to be as brief as possible with your questions and comments. Please confine, if you would, please, the question to one subject at a time in order to allow others to address the team here. As a courtesy to other shareholders, matters of individual concern, not relating specifically to this meeting or the business of the company, please defer those to the end of the presentation, and if you'd like, talk specifically with an officer or director as appropriate. Questions will be limited to three minutes per person.
Just a final note, the use of cameras, recording equipment, communication devices, or any other type of equipment is prohibited by the bylaws of our company. I wanted to introduce now Zach Spencer, and he'll give you the secretary's report. Please go ahead, Zach.
Thank you, Del. The board of directors fixed March 31, 2026, as the record date for determining the shareholders of record entitled to notice of and to vote at this meeting. Shareholders of record at the close of business on March 31, 2026, were provided with notice of the meeting and may vote either in person or by duly authorized proxies. James Robertson has been appointed to act as the inspector of election, and he has taken his oath as the inspector of election. Based on the information from our transfer agent, EQ Equiniti, Broadridge Financial Solutions, and the bylaws of the company, a quorum is present and this meeting has been duly called for business. Upon entering the meeting, each of you should have registered at the registration desk. If anyone has not registered, you should please do so. In addition, each of you should have received an agenda.
On the right side of the agenda are the rules of conduct for the annual meeting. In fairness to all shareholders and in order to permit an orderly meeting, we ask that participants abide by these rules. There will be time for questions immediately following management's presentation. Thank you. Del?
Thanks, Zach. That's great. Let's get into the agenda. There are four matters of business on the agenda for today's meeting. Shareholders of record and their duly appointed proxies are entitled to vote on these four matters. If you previously returned your proxy and do not wish to change your vote, you don't need to do anything further. If you've already completed but not returned your proxy, you should do so at the time the ballots are being collected, which will be right after this. If you have not voted by proxy or you wish to change your proxy vote, please raise your hand now and we'll bring you a new ballot. These ballots will be collected after the resolutions have been presented and discussed. If anybody needs a ballot, I guess there's three or four here.
Zach, can we I guess Julie and Alexia will be do that. Yeah. Is that everybody? We're good to go? Okay. As I mentioned, these ballots will be collected after the resolutions have been presented and discussed. First matter open to the voting, to elect nominees to serve as directors on the board of directors of the company, this term will expire 2027 annual meeting. The following individuals have been nominated for election as directors of the board Comstock: Donald Colvin, Corrado De Gasperis, Leo Drozdoff, Walter Marting, myself, Bill Nance, Steve Pei, Kristin Slanina, and Robert Spence. Do I have a motion to open the vote on the election of the directors?
I make a motion to open the vote, Bill.
Do I have a second?
I second.
The board of directors recommends that the shareholders vote for each of these nominees. Thank you. Second matter on the agenda is a proposal to ratify the appointment of Assure CPA as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending December 31st, 2026. Do I have a motion to open the vote to ratify the appointment of Assure CPA, LLC?
Okay, I move that motion.
A second for that motion?
Second.
Board of directors recommends that the shareholders vote for this proposal. Third matter on the agenda is the proposal to approve non-binding advisory resolution relating to the compensation of the named executive officers. Do I have a motion to open the vote on this non-binding advisory resolution?
Moved, Mr. Chairman.
Do I have a second?
Second.
The directors recommend that the shareholders vote for this proposal. Thank you. The fourth matter on the agenda is the Comstock 2026 Equity Incentive Plan. Do I have a motion to approve this incentive plan?
I motion to approve.
A second for this?
Second.
Again, the board of directors recommends that the shareholders vote for this proposal. Thank you. Okay, these matters now are before us and we are ready to vote. It's now 9:12 A.M. and the polls are open. Any person holding proxies to vote at this meeting who has not already turned them in to the inspector of the election or holding a completed ballot should turn them in now to the inspector of election or one of his assistants from Comstock. If you'd please do that would be great.
In the meantime, James, Zach, Darcy, and the team will be collecting the ballots and we'll wait for the final tabulation. If you want to get a cup of coffee or something, there'll be a brief pause here while we collect and tabulate these votes.
Did I miss the ballot?
Right here, Mr. Chairman.
Oh, thank you.
Good to go? Okay. All right. Thank you very much. We're going to now have the report of the inspector of the election. Mr. Inspector, I declare the polls are now closed. Can you please make your report on this at this time?
I can. As Inspector of Elections, I have reviewed the report of Broadridge and a tally of votes submitted at the meeting. Based on preliminary reports of the voting to be certified by me, I wish to announce that the individuals nominated to serve as directors of the corporation have been elected by the affirmative vote of a plurality of the corporation shareholders. The appointment of Assure CPA, LLC, as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year ended December 31st, 2026, has been ratified by a majority of the actual votes cast at this meeting. The non-binding resolution relating to the compensation of named executive officers has been approved by a majority of the votes cast. Finally, the Comstock Inc. 2026 Equity Incentive Plan has been approved by a majority of the votes cast at this meeting.
Thank you, James. I'll now entertain a motion to adjourn the formal meeting.
I motion to adjourn the meeting.
Do I have a second?
Second.
All in favor say aye.
Aye.
Motion carries unanimously. This concludes our meeting. Thank you again very much for your interest in Comstock, and now I'll turn the floor over to Corrado, and it's all yours.
Thanks, Del.
There you go.
Thank you. Can everyone hear me okay? Sounds like a yes.
I think we buffered the schedule quite a bit, which is good, because that'll allow us to go through this presentation and go through Q&A. I do want to make sure when we get to the Q&A that everybody does have the chance to ask questions. We'd like to try to limit people to one question per, and if we have time, we can take some more questions at the back end. Sometimes people get a little over-passionate and ask a gazillion questions, so let's try not to do that. I think that once we're done with the overview, we'll go through the Q&A period, and then we'll segue into lunch. I'm not sure if it's practical, but it seems likely that we'll be very comfortably on or ahead of schedule for that.
I think everybody knows where we are since you're all here, and people who are not here, I'm sorry. We're going to do a tour of what we call the Comstock Loop after the lunch, and it's pretty remarkable what's happening here in Northern Nevada. For those of you who aren't familiar, we pronounce it Nevada, not Nevada. Nevada. What's happening in the northern quadrant, just within these blue lines that you see behind me, is extraordinary. Almost unbelievable until you see it. We're going to leave Reno, we're going to head due east and enter the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center. The Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center was known to us locally for many years until 2014 when Elon Musk chose Tesla's first Gigafactory location here.
Most of us locally refer to it as the Tesla effect, because it seemed after that, every relocating company took a look at Northern Nevada. It felt for a long time that we were always in the top three, be it Nevada, Texas, or one other state. I think everyone knows Musk ultimately chose Nevada and Texas for his Gigafactories. Something extraordinary happened. Switch showed up and started building hyperscale data centers, and it was an obscurity to most people. It'd be hard-pressed to name a data center that isn't located here. There are a few, and they're trying to get in. We're going to drive through the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, and you'll see that.
Last I understood, there was somewhere between eight and 10 million square feet under construction, and that probably didn't include Tract, which right now has about 2,500 acres under development. It's just extraordinary. What happened, though, is Elon Musk demanded, I guess, that the governor build a connecting highway from I-80 right into Silver Springs. We're going to take that connecting highway all the way through, four-lane superhighway, right into Silver Springs. The Comstock Metals team is ready, willing, and excited to host us all and tour the facilities and talk to the team directly. We had a local open house a ways back, and we were overwhelmed with the amount of people. Pete, you were there. There was a lot of folks that came out, and really enjoyed. There was nothing really built then. Now you're going to see it all.
I'm going to share a few pictures with you just to give you a glimpse. I know some of you can't do the tour, we'll give you just a little bit of visual of what you might miss. What's happening, Nevada's always thought of as Vegas, right? It was gaming that drove the state, and mining to the north. Gaming is still there. Mining is booming, as you can see with the gold and silver prices. This industrial loop is what's exploding. It's exploding in a way that would probably be difficult to exaggerate. The Metals team, I'm going to just show you a quick picture of the Metals team. I think most of you know Judd and I.
If you've had the benefit of meeting Fortunato, you know that he's a cornerstone of the chemistry, of the metallurgy, of the engineering, and of the entire supply chain that's being built for Comstock Metals. Isaac Nicholson, who's in the room, we've contracted with Isaac. We'd like him to join us full time, but he's helping us dramatically with the marketing and expansion of the marketing now that the platform is being established. We have just an incredible, competent team from HS&EP to operations to logistics to production. If you get a chance to meet Isaac, meet Kayla, meet Paul, meet Fortunato, when you're actually out there this afternoon, please do. Say hello, ask them questions directly. Del's already introduced the whole board. I don't need to reintroduce the board.
I would like to say that with the advancements that we've made in the technology, with the expansions that have started to occur, we did need to first and foremost clean up our balance sheet and recapitalize the company. If you guys recall the shareholder letter from January, not of 2026, 2025. It was a tough letter. We had to do a reverse split. We had to recapitalize. We had to position the company because all of a sudden we had two technologies, one in particular getting to the finish line of the development and starting to incur revenue. In that same context, we've expanded the board. We've expanded the representations across financial, legal, capital markets, good governance, good experienced governance, coming from recycling industries with Bob Spence, coming from solar with Don Colvin, coming from capital markets with Steven Pei. Please take the time to say hello.
It's already been extraordinary. We've been able, as you can see on this slide, we've been able to better allocate the committee work. Better allocate the workload so that the company and management is dedicating its capacity significantly, dramatically, fully, to the operation of the business with good governance, with good oversight, and quite frankly, with very valuable input for us. That balance sheet in August of last year or July in last year was certainly challenged from a liquidity perspective. We had very little cash, and it was challenged from a complexity perspective. We raised capital with various instruments that would certainly not have been our preference. Adam Sands, who's here with Titan Partners, I think we met three years ago. Adam's like, "Well, we like the technology. We think we like you, but you're not ready. You just get a demo up and running.
We don't even know if it works." A year later, it was like two years ago, it was like, "Great progress. Amazing potential. Still not ready." It's disappointing, right. Because we're driving the business. Last year, "Hey, we think you guys are ready." That was incredibly rewarding internally, to say, like we need to professionalize not just the banking partners, but we need to professionalize the capital structure, the capital base. Sometimes there's scuttlebutt about institutional versus retail. We don't feel that at all. We've never used the word change the capital base. We've always used the word grow, increase, establish. If you looked at our top 50 holders in May of 2025, you might recognize, you might recognize four institutions. After January, if you look at our top 40, we've got 34 that have filed 13-Fs. 34.
I was only comfortable putting the logos on this page that filed. There's a heck of a lot more. If you look at the top 50, yep, you'll see Pete, you'll see Dan. You'll see three or four retail investors. Guess what? The rest of you are still there. We built the base stronger, more robust, and we do anticipate Adam's team will be very interested to now start picking up coverage for the company. Next step, professionalize the coverage, get research reports out there. Adam may or may not like this, but we got some other banks saying, "Hey, we want to pick up some coverage on you, too." It's all part of the evolution. One of the things, I can't delete this slide. It's old news now, and I apologize. We eliminated substantially all of these obligations.
George Malis. Is this George? Where's George? George. George Malis, who has been a shareholder for a decade. For a decade. We would consider George institutional, but before the capital raises of the last two, he was in the top three shareholders. There might've been a few instances where he was number one. He also had loaned us $9 million in promissory notes. Part of the agreement to raise his capital was to eliminate all that debt. George was willing to accept stock to eliminate the debt, and he did that. I'm happy to report today that all of that is extinguished, all of that is completed, and in fact, George paid us back $1.75 million in excess value because of the stock's appreciation. We paid off all the debt, and we got $1.75 million back, $1.25 miilion in January, $580,000 yesterday. Thank you.
It's very good for our liquidity and our financial position. It's extraordinary when you work in a win-win environment, and you can actually collaborate and have a shareholder base that when you hit a bump, when you have an issue, they step up and say, "How can we help you?" Versus the alternative. Look, what are we going to do this year. I know everybody wants to talk about metals. I'm almost there. Want to talk about Sierra Springs. I'm almost there. From a corporate perspective, we still have a little bit more wood to chop. Sometimes it's disappointing for folks when we say we're going to monetize. I use the word monetize when I'm not exactly sure how the transaction's going to look. Monetize to you should mean we do something that we get money for.
I can say much more robustly now, we're selling the mining assets. I said it on the last call that we expect to close that deal in the third quarter. It is on track. We feel very, very good about it. Why? Why do we feel good about it? Because every dollar that comes out of a non-productive asset that goes into a productive asset is exponentially better in value creation for our shareholders. It is extraordinary the speed, the magnitude, and the sustainability of producing metals from urban sources. You probably have heard the term, urban mining. That's what we're doing. To extract metals from waste, to extract metal from urban sources. We believe we could produce a lot more silver a lot faster than any of our mines ever could.
We would rather take that capital and produce silver, aluminum, copper, and these other metals and materials faster, more profitably. Not more environmentally friendly, ridiculously more environmentally friendly. We're literally keeping toxic, hazardous waste materials out of landfills, out of ecosystems, out of your food, and out of your water supply, and reusing all those metals. Where are we reusing them? In the U.S. That's our claim to fame. We're going to monetize, we're going to sell these mining assets. We're also looking for, and Mary Beth is here, Dan's here, they can tell you, we want to monetize the assets in Silver Springs. We're excited about monetizing the assets in Silver Springs. I know that was a little ambiguous before because we weren't sure how we were going to do it.
We had this big obligation hanging over our head, Comstock stepped up and said we are going to resolve that obligation. By doing that, we went from 17% ownership to over 50% ownership. Good for everybody, because now the obligation is free, and we have an exciting asset that a lot of people want. To do that, we had to ensure that there's power that goes to the site. Our corporate objectives, sell the mining assets, position Sierra Springs to be monetized. To do that, we must bring power to it. We've realigned, we've powered, and expanded our ownership to do what? To monetize.
I'm still using the word monetize because I don't know exactly how we're going to do it, but man, it is looking very good. Lastly, and I know some people are anxious to hear more about it, but we needed to integrate, we needed to realign, we need to professionalize Bioleum to be able to advance this integrated farm-to-fuel solution with strong leadership. Okay, all that is on tap for 2026. We feel great about it. When these things are done from the corporation's perspective, what have we achieved? Well, non-dilutive cash in the treasury and the total support of the growth of Comstock Metals. That's why we're taking a bus tour out there, because we want you to see the foundation, the platform of what we're about to expand.
Many of you know that Comstock Metals was the first, I believe still the only operating solar recycling company in North America that's R2v3 certified, which means for us that we have a zero landfill solution. It's still hard for people to believe that every ton of material that comes into the plant gets reprocessed, contaminates are cleanly eliminated, and we reuse and resell all the material, meaning we've never sent an ounce to a landfill, and there's no ounce of waste sitting around anywhere. You'll see it today. To do that, we got first of a kind permit in Nevada. The regulators were stringent with us, so stringent. In fact, it was challenging because they literally didn't want us to generate any hazardous waste. If you generate any hazardous waste, 5%, 6%, 2%, we don't believe you'll meet the threshold as a recycler. We're a zero landfill solution.
We meet the threshold. It'd be very difficult for someone else to get those permits here in Nevada. It's not impossible for sure, but it would probably take at least two years if they showed up tomorrow. Why is Nevada important? California, Arizona, and Nevada make up 50+% of the end-of-life market. We've secured master service agreements. Fortunato's not here this morning because he had a major customer visiting the site this morning. I said, "Make sure that customer gets the heck out of there before we show up at 1:30 P.M. with the bus." Complete site selection for two additional. We've selected the site for Vegas, we've selected the site for Ohio. We have a permit and a site in California, which is just a transfer station, but it's critical because most of our customers are in California. We're advancing the R&T for metal recovery.
Okay, in 2025 I'm sorry, we've engineered the solution that we are now working to prove this year to recover metals from the tailings. We increased our revenue during the year. We've started to do some real marketing analysis against our competitors. So far, we don't see much. Okay. We don't see much. There's quite a few folks out there, but we still see a lot of people saying that they're recyclers when they're in fact an important or meaningful part of the recycling supply chain, but they're not really recycling. Others are doing bad things. They're scrapping material and sending it overseas. Material is still going into landfills. We really feel like we've positioned ourselves to take something as of today that's very, very differentiated to scale, and scale is everything.
We've done the competitive analysis, we've done the comparisons, and now we're looking forward to this year. What are we going to do this year? We're going to deploy, assemble, commission, and showcase this operating system. It's not operating today, but you're going to see the assembly is near complete. You're going to see the scale of it. You're going to see the magnitude of it. You're going to see what has all been pulled together. Our goal is to get that thing up and running, and get it up and running very, very soon, and get it up and running so that it's profitable. It doesn't take a lot to get it to be profitable. 20%, 25% utilization makes that machine profitable. 40% to 45% utilization makes the corporation profitable, right? All that has to be proven still. All people want to see the revenue.
They want to see the cost. Yes, we've run a demo facility for two and a half years. It's not the same thing. Now we're going to run the big machine. Third quarter, fourth quarter, people will start to see those operations and those unit metrics. I think you're going to see a strong interest in our company when that thing's up and running. There's a lot of show-me-the-money people out there, and we're fixing to do just that. We continue to add customers through master service agreements. I said on the last call, this is the area that we have the least precision, the least certainty. I want to be clear. We're adding customers continuously. The customers are mostly names you would recognize. These customers are getting their responsibilities together, their resources together.
This notion that this much end-of-life panel waste is coming offline is still nascent, even to the industry. I've said before, in 2024, they were asking us, "Well, how do you think we should replace these things? What rate should we be replacing them?" 2025, they got their arms around the potential magnitude of the problem, they were choking on it because it's a lot of money. 2026, we're starting to see these companies put resources together, these companies certify and vet the supply chain, making decisions and putting budgets together. The message that I'm giving to you here is that it's been slow for them to accept reality, maybe is the right way to say it. Yes, it is a meaningful cost. These are hazardous materials. They must be disposed of responsibly.
We feel from a foundational perspective, it's going the way that it needs to go. We're also submitting permits for our second site. We're not going to order the equipment for the second site until the first site's operating, and quite frankly, until the first site's operating and we're seeing a nice trend up. We've got Northern Nevada, Southern Nevada, half the market can be covered from those two locations alone, and Ohio and Texas are on our radar screen. Ohio obviously is on more than our radar screen. You're going to see a map here in just a minute. You guys have been familiar with some of our maps showing the demographics of where all the solar panels have been deployed, the old ones. A lot of new ones are being deployed as well.
One of the things happening in Texas is they're breaking a lot of panels. I don't know why. Usually, you're supposed to have about a half a percent breakage rate when you're installing panels. We're seeing breakage rates of 2%, 3%, sometimes 4%. Well, how are you seeing that? Well, we're getting trucks of broken panels. That's what's happening. Quickly, most of you have seen this, I just want to highlight this. Our core technology, our plants look simple. They maybe don't look that impressive to some people, but our core technology is our know-how on eliminating the contaminants in the oven cleanly. That means we don't carbonize the material, we don't hurt the metals. We eliminate the laminates, the plastics, and the glues so that you can get clean glass, so you can get clean aluminum, and these tailings are available to be easily refined by others.
That's what we do today. We spent two and a half years proving it. We've proven that. We've also proven how much it costs to build this thing. $11 million is what we spent for facility one. We spent another $1 million upgrading the power infrastructure for it. We spent another $1 million for the storage alongside of it. Some of you are familiar with that $13 million number. There were $2 million of leasehold improvements that needed to be made to the buildings and the location. What we're also doing now is investing in some upgrade equipment because glass has all of a sudden become a very strong demanding market. Some of you have seen some of the investments like that NVIDIA made in Corning. There's an explosive amount of demand and demand for glass because of what's happening with our infrastructures.
We're dealing with some of the biggest glass companies in the country, and we're meeting their specifications. To meet those specifications, we had to upgrade some of the equipment. You're going to see that in the plant today. We don't just get paid to take this waste, we also get paid to resell it all. Most of you are familiar of our prediction of about $250 a ton to recover these metals, but that was based on a $35 silver price. Most of you heard me say that number is closer to $500 a ton with a $60 plus silver price. We're liking the way this whole thing has come together.
That is the machine that we've already deployed to clean these glass pearls and make them of the quality and of the specification for the largest glass companies in the country to remanufacture and reuse these glass for high-quality applications. The building finally got cleaned out. Thank God this is not what you're going to see when you get there today because it's now being assembled. We had to put an epoxy layer on the floor because cleanliness is absolutely critical to us, and ease of cleanliness is absolutely critical to us. Not only do we have an epoxy floor, we have a Zamboni, right? We keep the floor clean all the time. Scrubbers, generators, thermal oxidizers, robotic arms, platform for production, assembly for production, crushing, and storage alongside. In Nevada, you cannot store waste materials at the destination for processing site. You cannot do it.
You cannot put them in the same location. To put it in the same location, you would need a federal permit. To get a federal permit, you need at least half a decade. No one's doing RCRA permits for these kind of purposes. Nevada says, "We'll give you a RCRA permit, a RCRA light permit. We'll give you a written determination to allow you to process these materials as long as you don't store them on site." Well, what does that mean? Well, if a truck delivers materials on Tuesday, Corrado, and we come out on Wednesday and those materials are sitting there, you violate your permit. Okay, that seems silly. What if we put them right next door? Well, we'd like at least one layer. Here's 600 Lake. What if we put it at 700 Lake? Well, that feels a little too close for comfort.
How about 800 Lake? That works. What if we squeeze 700 Lake to be small? That works, too. All right. You see this little green space here? That's now 700 Lake. It's all coming online. The road's being repaved. Everything's coming together. It's all within the budgets that I just showed you. It's extraordinary. In a way, it's now an advantage because anybody else that comes in, and this is where Sierra Springs benefits Comstock. Okay? Sierra Springs Opportunity Fund owns 600 Lake Avenue. It owns 700 Lake Avenue. It owns 800 Lake Avenue. Comstock Metals leases from that company, together working very well for meeting each other's needs. This is the map that everyone saw, and I just want to repeat something. We believe there's 1.3 to 1.4 billion, with a B, solar panels deployed in the United States today.
Supposed to last 25-plus years. On average, our statistics tell us they're lasting at about 10 years less than that. 14, 15, 16, 17 years. Very common. That was the surprise to the industry. That was what Fortunato recognized four years ago before it actually hit, and that no one was attending to it. He recognized it because he was in the recycling industry. He was paying attention to some of these supply chains, and he didn't see one. The bigger the circle, the older the panels. Oops, sorry. You can see between Arizona and Nevada and, of course, California, you have almost 60%. It's like 55-plus% of the end-of-life target market is in the southwest region of the U.S. I came to learn that this is an old map. It's like three years old. We started updating it.
Here's some of the expanded deployments that are occurring right now in the U.S., here's the ones that are under development. Texas should grab your eye. Yes, it's true, California has the massive amount of old ones. That's our market today. They're still deploying. They're still deploying. Look at Texas. Anyone who has the perception that solar Does solar have headwinds? I guess it has headwinds. Are they still deploying like there's no tomorrow? It certainly seems that way from the data. For us to be able to bring in a tipping fee, to be able to then resell all of those materials, and to do it in a very fast, very efficient, critically very effective method. If the aluminum has plastics glues, then there's going to be lead stuck to it.
There's going to be, in some cases, depending on the panel, cadmium stuck to it. Now you don't have sellable product. You have a hazardous waste that has to be paid for to dispose. Some people said to me earlier, "We didn't even realize the glass issue. We didn't realize that you might've been worried about selling all the glass." Well, we weren't really worried about selling all the glass. We just knew that if 15% of the mass balance is aluminum and 15%-20% of the mass balance is these tailings that are rich in silver and other metals, 70% is glass. We need to make sure that we have good off takes for this glass. What you're going to hear Fortunato tell you is that the people who are qualifying us want all the glass we can give them.
Now we have a real business opportunity, but we have a real business challenge. We need to be a reliable supplier of clean glass to these big companies. We're very excited about it because it's all falling into place. Lastly, we're not satisfied with selling industrial tailings to other refiners. This is my cartoon of Fortunato's engineered design, of which now working with four different partners, we are bench testing, we are piloting, and we are working very, very hard this year to be able to get a pilot up and running to extract first silver, then silica and silicon, and then ultimately the rest of the metals. If we do that, this already differentiated system will be remarkably differentiated. It will change our strategic position in the market, and of course it will change our economics.
If we want to be disciplined, we could say to you that when you are integrating a system and operating it at a pilot level, that's called TRL6, Technology Readiness Level six. Okay? When you scale it up to a bigger operation and demonstration scale where a whole supply chain is working, that's TRL7, and that's what we did at 600 Lake in the smaller facility for over two and a half years. TRL8 is industry scale. You were able to scale it up 20x from doing 5,000 tons a year to 100,000 tons a year. To scale it to that level, you need to process a panel every seven seconds. Even our strongest, most healthy men and women can't do that. We have to automate it. It has to be robotic. You'll see the robotic systems when you tour the plant this afternoon.
Having that ability, and then ultimately, so what we're saying is if we could fully integrate a pilot, that would be TRL6. What does that look like? 1 ton a day. 1 ton a day. We would then take it to demonstration scale, TRL7. What does that look like? 20, 25 tons a day. What does industry scale look like? Well, we would like it to be somewhere between 50 to 100,000 tons a year. That's 250 tons a day. You go from 1 ton a day to 25 tons a day to 250 tons a day. On the TRL scaling legacy for heavy industrial materials, going up 10x is very common. Going up 20x is very common. 100X, we don't know. Anyway, why are we doing all this? We want to keep these industrial metals home.
Comstock is famous for silver mining, the silver kings, the Comstock Lode. The demand for silver is going up dramatically because of electrification. It's happening everywhere. More advanced batteries, more advanced photovoltaics, robotics, GPUs. Anything that's electronic is using these conductive minerals, and the demand is going up, but it's gone up to a point where there's a deficit. For the last four years, for the first time that I could remember, certainly for the first time that I've been in the industry, the use of silver well exceeds the production four years in a row in the tens to hundreds of millions of ounces. In March, China's imports of silver went through the roof. This is what's happening in the world, where short silver is the answer. Now, let me switch over to Sierra Springs, because this is what we've spoken the least about.
Why have we spoken the least about it? Because Comstock Seed invested this in 2019 because we had a couple of properties in Silver Springs. We didn't know what to do with them. We didn't know how to do with them. We just thought we had some really good properties and some really good water rights. In 2018, well, 2017, the first Trump administration passed the Opportunity Zone legislation. In 2018, Comstock seeded a company, and we formed Sierra Springs Opportunity Fund, Inc. Storey County, Nevada, in its entirety, and Silver Springs, Nevada, adjacent, formed one of the largest Opportunity Zones in the country. As the crow flies 10 miles from the California border, people say, "Well, how does Storey County qualify for the Opportunity Zone?
Isn't it supposed to be a lower income district? Well, Storey County was a lower income district in two census ago, and Lyon County's a lower income district, and there was kind of a clause that said, if you're adjacent to an existing one and you're a previous one, you qualify. Storey County probably has very good lobbyists. They convinced, it was Steven Mnuchin at the time, the Treasury Secretary, that they qualified, and this Opportunity Zone was born. We said, "This is an opportunity. Let's create a company to take advantage of this. Let's see if we get some really good investors." Dan Schor was a founding investor. Mary Beth was one of the first investors. We started consolidating a lot more land. We like the area because Nevada, and especially this northern part of Nevada, is one of the safest areas in the U.S. disaster zone map.
When it comes to hurricanes and floods and earthquakes, now, we're very stable in that context. We ended up putting together 2,500 acres of land. Over 1,000 of it is almost ideally suited for these light industrial expansions, for sure, and data centers. There's also commercial real estate. There's also residential real estate. There's a housing crisis in northern Nevada. If you're wondering, how does this all come together? Well, here's the old and original Comstock Lode. That teal section there, that was the origination of our company. I don't want to be coy about this. We are selling the mineral district. We're taking that capital, and we're redeploying it into metals. Right down the street, Highway 50, which used to be a lonely two-lane road, we've consolidated thousands of acres of land. Switch and Tesla and Google and Microsoft and Tract and Redwood, all these companies.
Most people that don't live here are shocked when they see it. The lands surround the regional airport, which Sierra Springs also owns and operates. We've identified a block of that land that is just ideally suited for this kind of Data Centers. It is advantage not because it's so well-located. It is. It's not advantage because it's so flat. It is. It's not advantage because we have water rights. We do. What most people don't realize is the fiber network in this area is exceptional. The fiber network is exceptional. It's 2 milliseconds to Reno. It's like 8 milliseconds to L.A. The fiber network here is powerful. Well, that's why Microsoft's here. That's why Google's here. That's why Switch is here. Power is the last variable.
As all these folks were expanding like there was no tomorrow, they sucked up the grid, just like they did everywhere else in the country. We stepped in, and we committed to natural gas that would allow initially up to 300 MW of power and eventually over 1.2 GW. Now people are getting excited. We had to create that opportunity. We had to deploy the capital to own the properties free and clear. We did that. We're finishing that. We had to commit the capital to get the power. In the grand scheme of things, it's not a lot of capital. To us, it is. Hence some of the hesitation, hence some of the concern. We share it with you. The board shares it with you. We talk about it a lot. Okay. We've got it. We've got the power edge, okay.
We've got the fiber, and you're going to see it yourself. What's the proof? Microsoft's right across the street, 180 acres. You're going to see the Vantage Data Center. They're building these things on the top of mountains now. They're paying more to move earth, you're going to see it now, than we would sell our land for probably, because our land's flat as a board. Don't need to move any earth. We've got the acreage for hyperscale. We're excited. The opportunity is being defined. We've had third parties come in and assess it, and so far they're saying this and this. Okay? We're feeling good about this investment, and we're feeling good about monetizing it. Do we know how we're going to monetize it? Not exactly. Do we have notions? Yes, we do. Okay?
We will work through this as a diligent board, as a diligent management team. Sierra Springs and Comstock are now glued at the hip. I've always felt that way, but now it's fortified. Great things will happen. I've had many of you say to me, "My God, if that's true, the value of that is worth more than the whole company." Unfortunately, that's true in a couple of instances, and that is where we haven't done a good job, and that is where we have to do a better job. I appreciate this board. I appreciate the independence of the board. I'm the only executive director. Everyone else is an independent director. They bring competency from real estate, from capital markets, from clean energy, from recycling, et cetera. Together, I'm sure we could figure out the right answer, and then it's about execution.
That's the thing I want to leave you with before we go to Q&A. Just one thing. It's all about execution. It's on me and our teams to execute. Anything else that we say is just that. It's just conversation. The only thing that matters is we sell those assets, we monetize this portfolio, we process panels, and sell metals. That's it. If we do that, all the other nuances in the world will take care of themselves. Last point on that. The compensation committee, I'd like to thank you for approving overwhelmingly some shares to compensate management. The comp committee has worked its butt off for the last two months, there's three things I can tell you. Our stock-based compensation is performance-based. What performance? The exact objectives that we disclosed, I reviewed with you. If we don't achieve those objectives, we're not getting compensation.
If we achieve those objectives, we're getting the compensation. Okay? It's tied to appreciation in the share price. If we grow the value of this company by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions, said it three times, then we will vest some of that compensation, and if we don't, we won't. It's performance-based, but it's stock-based so that we're aligned with the shareholders. We only make money if we're making the shareholders money first. We have a three-year plan. If we're not around at the end of that third year, we're not getting anything either. There's no mini league vesting here. You got to get to the finish line to achieve it. We heard that from you. We heard that from many shareholders, especially some of our new shareholders. Why doesn't management have more stock?
Why isn't your compensation more aligned with the performance of the stock? We addressed it head on. Okay? Bob Spence is the chairman of the comp committee, brand new. Kristin, Leo, Bill, four people on the committee, worked very hard over the last two months to get it done by today. If you guys didn't approve it, we would've been shit out of luck. We would've been out of luck. You did. Thank you. We can move forward with it. Okay. Questions. If I could just repeat, try to hold it to one, and then we'll let everybody else get a chance. Probably someone else will ask that second or third question you are thinking about, and if not, then we can circle back if there's unanswereds.
Rob?
Yes.
Is this microphone on?
Yes, it is.
All right, everyone. I will hold the microphone for you. You do not need to grab the microphone. This is just like a professional television interview. Please raise your hand, I will work my way across the room, and please state your name at the beginning. Thank you. This gentleman. I'll hold the microphone for you. I am professionally trained in this. Okay. Ask your question to Mr. De Gasperis, please.
Thank you.
State name .
My name is Rick Sovell.
Hey
I noticed that around the Silver Springs area, the housing is pretty sparse. Is that included with the situation with the employment of the corporations that we're going to be building in the area?
Yeah. Couple of things there. I would argue that Reno has really become unaffordable for anybody working in the industrial park. I almost can't afford to live in Reno what I'm saying. I don't live in Reno, by the way. Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center allows for no residential housing. Northern Nevada Industrial Center allows for no residential housing. The next location is Silver Springs. Silver Springs has a tremendous amount of residential housing capacity. Okay. I think it's natural. Silver Springs also needs some commercial development. It needs a downtown. It needs a grocery store. You have to drive 25 minutes to go grocery shopping one way. Everyone is converging on Silver Springs. I think everyone knows that Microsoft just broke ground. I think you probably don't know that the first truck stop in 7-Eleven has now showed up at the intersection.
Tract, which you're going to see today what they're building, their third site is in Silver Springs. There is more capacity beyond just light industrial. Silver Springs is light industrial. You're not going to see a Gigafactory in Silver Springs. You're not going to see a medical waste incinerator in Silver Springs. You'll see those in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center. You will see light industrial, which Class A office space, light manufacturing like solar recycling, also data centers.
I'll hold the microphone for you.
Hi.
Hi, Bob.
We may have to change our name to Comstock Metals. Anyway, I like to do back of the napkin calculations. I use 37 panels per ton, and between now and 2030, we're talking 1 million tons, right?
Yep.
Now, 1 million tons times-
2030
37 is 37 million panels.
Yeah.
Without going into it, that's over four years of work if we just get 25% of the market, assuming competition.
Yeah.
There's one extra question in here. How does the EPA feel about us compared to the competition on the way we destroy panels? Thank you.
Thank you, Bob. Okay, I'm going to do it in backwards order. The EPA for this discussion purpose is the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection, which Leo Drozdoff, one of our independent directors, used to run. It used to be part of his job responsibility. They are sophisticated, especially when it comes to the mining industry. Nevada has a robust regulatory infrastructure from EPA, environmental protection perspective. They got overwhelmed with all these battery recyclers. Redwood and American Battery and all these Aqua Metals. All these battery people somehow landed in Nevada, okay? Tesla had something to do with that. It's a new thing for them. It's a very hazardous notion to recycle batteries. We dipped our toe in it, water was cold, we ran the other way. Okay?
Generally speaking, there is an incredibly positive recognition of our approach to recycling these panels, and I don't think it's out of school to say, we from our mining legacy have the highest regard for environmental stewardship. We were recognized by five regulators in the state twice in a row for getting reclamation excellence. The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection, the Nevada Division of Minerals, they all hold us as a corporation in high regard, and they've started to make inquiries beyond even, "Hey, we like that you're a zero waste solar recycler. We like it. Could you reprocess other types of tailings and extract other metals as well?" We don't know yet. We'll see. We're getting good interface from the regulators.
From the federal perspective, let's go into the competitive discussion, we would love nothing more than the federal EPA to designate solar panels as universal hazardous waste. California's done that. Nevada reciprocates with California, which means it's extremely expensive to put this in a landfill with that designation. We see funny business happening, Bob. We see some people trying to hide waste panels in auto fluff and send it to a landfill for $100 a ton. Mix it in construction waste and send it to a landfill. That's not legal. It's happening. Some of these folks that say the recycler is just shredding the metal and sending it to Korea or China to be refined. Dirty. Okay, that's bad. Our 25%, that's okay, good.
I think our number's like 33 million- 34 million expected by 2030. We're pretty close to what you're saying from a market assessment perspective. We got to educate, and that's why we got Isaac came on board. We've got to educate the market. These are bad practices that are not only illegal or improper, they hurt people. They hurt people. It's putting this stuff back into the environment, which we can avoid. Yeah, we're with you 100%. Is the three or four million that went end of life last year to 33 million or 34 million that's going to go by 2030, is it going to be a nice, smooth, super predictable line? No. It's going to go boop because these guys are just getting their heads around it. They're just getting their heads around it.
Now, as we engage the biggest guys, people who have 25 million panel arrays in one project, they start asking us, "Well, maybe we can co-locate. Maybe we can partner." There's a big problem. All this waste is coming out. 35 million panels, Robert, it's the tip of a 1.3 billion panel iceberg. Correct, 30 years, I get it, but it's coming. I guess I would leave you with there are competitors, there are competitive pressures, there are competitive, anti-competitive practices that we have to overcome to get more panels. Okay. We feel good when it's us against some of the other recyclers. We feel like we have the best solution.
We think when we can showcase what you're about to see operating they're going to say, I don't know if they'll be wowed or not, but they're certainly going to say, "The other guy doesn't have that yet." We're in a good place to get business. We're in a good place to get market share. It's certainly, I would be disappointed if we end up with 25%, but let's go for it. Right? Next question.
All right. Just a reminder, I will hold the microphone. I was a running quarterback in the triple option, wishbone offense. I will not give up the ball or the microphone. Please state your name.
John Kerry, shareholder, Corrado.
Hey, John. Good to see you.
Good seeing you. Thanks for the presentation. In third quarter of 2025, Bioleum was a billion-dollar valuation, and everybody was excited about it.
Yeah.
Today you didn't even talk about it.
Yeah.
What's up?
Yeah. Great. I should've talked about it. I'm sorry that I didn't. I'm glad you asked the question. I guess I was pretty confident someone would ask the question. In May of last year, we effectively separated the company. We didn't deconsolidate it for accounting lingos, but we separated it with standalone governance, standalone leadership, and we got some good capital to come in. I'd like to correct one thing, and maybe it's me correcting myself if I said something that was not as clear. That capital came in, first of all, Marathon invested and contributed a state-of-the-art biorefining facility in March of 2025. Another investor put in capital, $20 million, in May of 2025. Neither one of them committed to a valuation. Marathon capped themselves at $700 million, and the other one allowed the Bioleum team to target a valuation. It was over $1 billion. Okay?
Both of them said, "We don't want to set the valuation. Go out and finish the capital raise, and whatever the real rest of the market says, we'll go to." It's not correct, and we're consolidating, so we don't have an investment on the books. The way that we structured it, we have a $65 million preferred instrument that sits at the top of the capital stack and has liquidation preference over Marathon and everyone else. We're so aligned with Marathon and Mardis, and the other investors on what the potential of this could be. The team went out with that financial wherewithal, and they acquired and integrated the RenFuel technology into the business. RenFuel, for those of you that don't know, was a technology that can take lignin and esterify into an oil.
If you can esterify that into a stable oil, it can blend with other oils and create more available feedstock for the refining industry. That's what Marathon likes. Okay? Marathon uses soybean oils and those kinds of oils for refining. If you could blend Bioleum oils with their solution, you double your feedstock, you lower your cost, you lower your carbon score. That was the idea. We had the opportunity, which was extraordinary, to acquire Hexas. I see Pete Heitzman, for those of you who didn't notice, wearing a Hexas hat, Hexas baseball cap. Hexas provides low carbon, low cost, high yielding woody biomass. It provides it where you want it. You could literally grow from farm to fuel that solution. There was time, I would say through January, of integrating those activities. Quite frankly, Hexas changed the game pretty dramatically for us.
If you looked at the team, it was all about chasing waste wood all over the place. "Oh, I saw a bunch of waste wood, let's go get it all." Now it changed the game so dramatically. Most people, it took some time to reintegrate it. I think that they have an extraordinary solution. They are not TRL6. They are not TRL7. You compare it to Comstock Metals, who ran a TRL7 facility for two and a half years, and now scaling up to industry scale. I think maybe they thought they were. Okay? That's disappointing. That's disappointing. They're not. They're not TRL6. TRL6, by super disciplined definition, means you have wood to fuel integrated in one solution. I don't care if it's a ton a day, just like we're going to do with our metal refining. They don't have that yet.
What the Madison facility does is it gives them an opportunity to do that. State-of-the-art equipment, state-of-the-art facility. They're going to go out, try to raise the rest of that money. The valuation will not be $1 billion. It will not be $700 million. It'll be lower. Hopefully in the $hundreds of millions. Hopefully. Okay. We will have a path to TRL6, to TRL7. Hexas can be commercialized today. We are getting inquiries from around the world because it's high yielding, high carbon, low carbon score, high carbon content, low cost. I think wherever the world ends, feedstock's the bottleneck, we have the solution. Solution is enough of the right type of feedstock and the technology to convert it into the fuel. If that's disappointing, let's be frank, it's disappointing to me. We don't wallow in our disappointment. We fix the problem.
Team's been realigned. Team's been reintegrated. The leaderships of that team coming from the Madison facility, coming from Hexas, coming from Oklahoma is good, my opinion. It's very good. Next question.
Tom Waddington. I'm a shareholder. Corrado, my question is about cash flow. I think I remember from your slide there that we have $41 million at the moment. I think you have a $2 million a month cash burn. How much money still needs to go into SSOF? What for and when?
Good question.
Also, how much money does Bioleum have at the moment? How much is, or how fast is it burning that money?
Yeah.
If it doesn't raise a Series A, is there going to be any need for us to put money into that?
Yeah. Great questions, all of them. The tough questions. Cash flow. No, it's a very good question. When we first talked to Titan, it was all about fully funding the ability to bring metals online and being funded sufficiently to turning profitable. Okay, we're very focused on that platform. That $40 million in cash I expect will go up from the sale of the mining assets. We said Q3. We can't give any more color in terms of the deal. We expect that number will go up. Okay? That's very important. To answer your question, as of the last quarter I'm just trying to make sure I don't say something that's not public. I guess it'll be public once I say it, that's okay.
As of the last quarter, we had about 9.5 million, I may or may not have said that, to go to extinguish the obligation that Sierra Springs has, and we kill two birds with one stone by doing that. We get 51% of the entity. More than half of that has already been paid. Okay? We have a little bit to go. We're keen to get it done. We're keen to get it done because we're getting a lot of outside interest now, and we want to have our house in order, in terms of Sierra Springs. What does that mean? The obligations are gone. The platform is free and clear. We're working with third parties to post the bonding that ensures that the power comes. I'll give you a little insight on that.
The only reason we have to bond this power commitment is because we're not Google. If we were Google, "Hey, good customer. Thank you for signing up for our power." We're not Google, we have to bond because we don't have a credit history. They complement the balance sheet, there's no credit history. There's no operating history. There's a lot of value in the land. We do not believe that it will be problematic to bond. Plus, the gas providers really like the opportunity bringing the power to that district. Step one, we finish off the investment in SSOF. Step two, we bond it. Step three, we monetize it. Okay? Now, Bioleum has about, it depends on how you do the math or how you calculate it, certainly, three months of runway. They burn about $700,000 a month. It depends, give or take.
There's been some realignment and some cost improvement that's been going on there. There's realignment cost improvement going on in the company. We feel pretty good about their ability to go out and raise the money. Is it guaranteed? No. Is it guaranteed? No. If it doesn't happen, would we and the other investors have to step in and address it? Yes. My priorities, close the mining asset sale, prepare SSOF for a big monetization, not a small monetization. Metals gets up and running, turns profitable, and Bioleum is stable. That's in writing on those objectives. Realign, stabilize, and then go. Go ahead.
Okay.
Don't touch the mic.
$4.5 million to perfect the ownership of SSOF needs to be paid.
Yep.
You've got for power, you didn't say how much that was going to cost.
We're looking for third parties to do surety bonding and bonding for that.
Okay. just the $4.5 million to perfect the ownership, and hopefully nothing else for SSOF?
We're doing the best of our ability. If there has to be some cash collateral for that bonding, then we're going to have to deal with that when it comes. We're hoping that we're not.
Okay. If you did need to put money into Bioleum, how much would it be? Would it be just enough for a couple of months to get to the Series A at $700,000 a month, or are you talking a bigger figure?
It's an undecided question, but that would be our preference if we have to do it. There's other alternatives, too. Right. I like the harder questions, Tom. He always asks hard questions.
Hi, I'm Frank Yantek. I'm a shareholder.
Hi, Frank.
AI is really hot right now, and we have the AI division. Haven't heard much about it. Can you let us know what they're working on, the annual revenues expenses, and kind of the outlook for that?
In one way, it's going to be a very easy answer to the question, right? Some people do not know, we had invested in the development of a material science development technology. Right? It was about developing new materials. It wasn't large language models. It wasn't Grok, ChatGPT, or Claude. Nothing like that. Right? It was all about, can we predict and better simulate the development of new materials? I'll tell you why we did it. We were pioneering in these days, okay? It was 2021, 2022, 2023. It was clear to us that if you're in a material development business and you're not using these tools to develop these materials, you're probably going to be a dinosaur in about six years. I still feel that way.
Nobody was doing it. We felt like somebody had to do it. Okay. We start to see $10 billion-$100 billion of budgets show up at Google and all these other companies. Initially it was language models. It was still the OpenAI mindset. We started to get some inquiries about material generation technology and material simulation. We knew there was no way we're in this game. It wasn't such a bad thing. We also knew someone else was going to do it, and we could just easily use that tech when and if it comes online. Okay. The hard answer, and I'm a little surprised that I haven't been clearer on this, I should be clear. We stopped investing in that years ago. No more investment, no more dollars, no more capital.
We have some rights to the technology that was developed. What we're doing now is we're just intelligently trying to incorporate better tools, better technologies into our laboratories. We're not trying to replace the lab with some magic wand. We're trying to incorporate smarter thinking. Our basic philosophy with AI is probably, I don't know that everyone thinks this way, but our view is it's like an Iron Man suit. Right? If our people can use these technologies for material science or for GAAP accounting, right, it makes them smarter, faster, stronger. Okay? We want to do that. We're doing that more than people probably would imagine. We're automating the plant. We have sensors and data collection, right? We want to certify everything in the blockchain.
We want to show our customers that we have certifiable daily real-time data that proves that we're zero landfill, that proves that we're the cleanest recycler unequivocally, irrefutably, irrevocably, and our competition won't be able to do that. We can make better, stronger offers, right, using that data. More data we have, the more intelligence that we can simulate from it. We're not into Technology development for AI. We're just into intelligently using these tools in our company. I tell my kids, my daughter's a lawyer, I said, "Ro, I don't think AI's going to replace lawyers." I actually do think that. I said, "I think it's going to replace lawyers who don't use AI." Okay?
You heard Jensen say it the other day, if I'm hiring kids out of college and one is passionate about AI and one's not, I'm not hiring the one I'm hiring the AI passionate one. That's where the world's going. It's going to be remarkably disruptive. Is there a silver lining in the $15 million that we spent? Painful, hurtful, but I feel like we have a lot of knowledge in the space, and we're not certainly going to repeat the mistakes and make foolish investments.
There's no revenue from that? What are the expenses of that?
We secured the tech that was developed. We have the rights to it. We were thinking about deploying it, integrating it into our R&D facility initially in Madison for fuels. We got bigger fish to fry. We're just intelligently incorporating these tools. I'm just going to say tools for the moment. We do see future factories being fully autonomous, 100%. We do see them being run agentically. I don't know if people even appreciate what all that means. We see it clearly. We see it clearly. We've got people in this room that are working on those platforms for us as we speak, as part of our normal operating expense. In other words, we're not saying we need to spend this much more money for that.
We're saying, "Stop doing those dumb things, and start doing those smart things." Without increasing our cost, but increasing our speed, increasing our effectiveness. Ultimately, technology, material science technology is our forte. Who can eliminate, depolymerize, and destroy these contaminants cleanly, efficiently, safely? There's a lot of tech there. It's literally the behavior of the electrons of certain materials that makes our ovens the most efficient. It's chemistry. Most of the recyclers are mechanical. They're mechanical engineers. They're not chemists. With lignin, it's a whole another thing. Lignin is very unstable. Why hasn't anybody converted lignin to oil? It's very hard. We're focusing on those things. Is that helpful?
Yeah. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you.
Corrado.
Yes.
We do have a question back here from this gentleman. Please state your name.
Mr. Konrad.
Hey. Brian Konrad, shareholder. My question's about the natural gas rights that you have going to the site.
Yeah.
If Comstock's putting up the security or making the guarantees, do we own that right, or does the Sierra Springs Opportunity Fund own that?
Today we own it. Tomorrow we would like Sierra Springs to take on the obligation. They want to because the power in the land is what creates the value. The power in the land is what creates the value. Ideally, it's that entity that has the power of the land and the water, and the fiber, which are the critical prerequisites for enabling it. That's our goal. That's our goal. Mr. Goldstein.
All right. Please state your name.
Rich Goldstein, shareholder and advisor to other shareholders. Corrado, thank you. First of all, congrats on a lot of the progress. Thank you.
Thank you.
for that. I think some of the other questions addressing the Sierra Silver Springs Opportunity Zone and our interest, just for clarity, if you can just talk about today what we own and what we have?
Yes
What you propose or think we may achieve post a benefit of developing these opportunities. Just clarifying.
Absolutely. Let me say, Sierra Springs Opportunity Fund Inc. owns 2,500 acres of land in Silver Springs. It owns and operates the Silver Springs Regional Airport. It owns 600 Lake Avenue with 140,000 sq ft manufacturing facility and a 7,500 sq ft demonstration facility. It owns thousands, 1,800, 1,900 acre feet of water rights in Silver Springs. Comstock Inc., or its subsidiaries, own 258 acres adjacent and contiguous with most of those acres and about 300 acre feet of water rights. That assemblage is powerful. Comstock stepped in to extinguish part of the obligation that was taken on to acquire all those lands by Comstock, certainly as an investor, and the Sierra Springs investors together. Once we make the final payment that Tom was referring to, we own 51% of Sierra Springs Opportunity Fund Inc.-ish. Could be 49%, could be 51%, could be 50.
It's a big number. I wouldn't even get hung up on the 49.9 vs 50.1 thing. Right? Everyone's strongly aligned on the goal of monetizing this. Mary Beth? Yes. Comstock saw the opportunity to commit to this natural gas. We went at it first from a Sierra Springs perspective. Right? It ultimately was more effective for Comstock to commit. It was the only real option, frankly. Okay? The big guys were there. The big guys. The guys in Fernley, the guys in TRIC, committing to 777,000 dekatherms a day of natural gas, which is now over 1.1 million dekatherms a day of natural gas for 2028. We took a little piece of that pie, 50,000 dekatherms. We took another piece of the pie, another 150,000 for 2030. Okay?
That is extremely attractive to people if you have the land and the power. Do we have the power? No. We have a commitment for a natural gas pipeline, but that enables the power. Now people can come in and buy gas through the line right to the properties. Still a lot of work to do there, but those are the critical prerequisites. Okay? It's a lot of hard work. Yeah, it's a lot of hard work. Six years, and we feel like we see a light at the end of the tunnel. That's, I guess, what I would leave Rich. Did I answer it properly?
Corrado, we have a question from Mr. Jolcover.
Mr. De Gasperis, could I call you Corrado?
Yes, sir.
I want to commend you and Steven and Leo on your SEC filings on buying shares and eating your own cooking. That's great.
Thank you.
I am a shareholder in Comstock Inc. I am a shareholder in SSOF going way back. The serendipity feeling of this meeting with Reno coming out and putting a moratorium on data centers, has probably quadrupled the value out there in Silver Springs. I attended last week, the groundbreaking where our governor kicked off Tract's second center. They have one at the north end on the Peru Shelf, one at the south end that is only 8 mi from Highway 50. They have $10 billion in cash, and they are going to spend $40 billion-$50 billion over the next 30-50 years just at those two facilities.
You have now hit, in my opinion, and I think you know I know a little bit about real estate, just the perfect timing and location and right assets at the right time. Next, I'm thinking you might be aware that Elon Musk has announced that he is putting in the largest solar manufacturing solar panel site in Texas, in North America. Your map that showed all of those circles about Texas, one of the things that Musk's operations are known for is speed. In that speed, initially, there's a tremendous amount of waste created.
Breakage.
I'm guessing, hopefully, that your team is looking maybe at the possibilities of getting some of the materials that come out of that facility when it starts up.
Yeah. That's two questions.
I think-
He's right under the three-minute time rule, so that's good.
All right. Well, first I just want to say very humbly, Tom, you're going to appreciate this. There's a very fine line between being a speculative idiot and a visionary, okay? I straddle that line. Everyone and their mother, except Anne, except Mary Beth, and except a handful of others, Leo, think, "What the hell's going on in Silver Springs?" "What are you guys talking about?" If you just looked at the demographics of Reno to Tri-Center to Northern Nevada Center, it just seemed like it was inevitable. Okay? We actually thought it would've been sooner, frankly. It's just a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. Honestly, with hindsight, probably would've done it differently. I think the one thing that we've suffered is we had too many things going on at the same time.
It wasn't the plan that Comstock would be a majority owner. It wasn't. It was that it would be independent. COVID hit, NV Energy ran out of power, I mean, things happen. Shit happens. We have perseverance, that's the one thing I guess I would acknowledge. We have real perseverance. The Reno moratorium is actually one tiny example of a pretty dramatic wave that's going across the country of communities rejecting these projects. In some cases, you could understand it, because the massive scale of what they're doing and the resource and energy consumption is scary, for sure. One of the things that we do have in Lyon County, in Storey County, is the trust of the county commissioners, it was earned. Not given, earned. That trust is not blanket.
It's because we're trustworthy and because any of the projects that we bring are going to be good for those communities. I actually think you're right. The demand is incalculable, and the ability to deploy that demand is getting curtailed, maybe artificially, maybe not artificially, by this resistance, making Storey and Lyon County huge beneficiaries. We were just approached by the Storey County Commissioner saying, "Do you want to join the Pro Data Center Alliance?" "Yes, we do." I didn't get to go to that. My father was ill. I missed the ribbon cutting for the Tract in NVIDIA, and the governor was there. You were there, I guess, right? The governor was there. The governor not only was so robustly supporting this development, the next day at the Development Authority, all he could talk about was data centers. The state of Nevada is open for business.
Northern Nevada is open for business. Storey County is open for business. Lyon County is open for business. Reno, I don't know. I don't know what's going on. In fairness to the metropolitan areas, they're congested. They probably need to worry about some of this a little more. I don't know if I answered. Did I answer both? Did I?
Good enough.
Good enough. Thank you. Any more?
Anyone who hasn't asked a question yet.
Alan Mace right there.
All right. I'll hold the microphone. I was a point guard, but I'm not going to give up the ball. I'm going right to the hoop.
Thank you for your health awareness.
Oh, this is job security.
Alan Mace, investor. Being that the company has what I guess is defined as the first-mover advantage with the process for the recycling or rehabbing of the solar panels, part of your strategy, as you've presented it, is to license or joint venture the process going forward. How, if possible, do you plan to protect the first-mover advantage, if at all possible?
Fantastic question. I don't know if I said that we were going to license it, but this is a great question, touching on something I don't think I addressed well. First and foremost, in terms of first mover, I would agree we're a first mover to scale. Okay? You've got two or three folks out there operating their systems, we believe similar size to our demo facility. Okay? They claim they can do things that we're pretty certain they can't do what we can do, but we're going to be the first to scale. If we get this thing up and running in this next month, we're going to be the first to scale, and that's still to be proven, and we need to execute. All the appropriate caveats. The know-how, Alan, is remarkable. It's remarkable in its effectiveness.
In some ways, it's remarkable in its simplicity, the chemistries. It's not simple. Fortunato will probably be offended that I said that because it's his life's work. Okay. We have purposely not patented that technology for a couple of reasons. Most of it is process tech, process know-how, process tech, chemistry, that would be weak if we patented it, we believe. Secondly, why would we want to give anybody a roadmap to what we know how to do and they don't? That's the first point, which is exactly why you asked the question the way you asked it. If we're going to joint venture with somebody, if we're going to license to somebody, which we have not said we're going to license in the United States. We're own and operate. We want to get seven facilities up and running across the country in key locations.
We want to have at least one, hopefully two metal recovery systems so that we're an industrial material company, and I think we're going to become a global industrial material company. I don't think you should think of us as just a solar panel recycler. Comstock Metals is a global industrial materials company. That's frankly my background, starting in industrial graphite. That's Fortunato's background. I spent 30 years doing it. He spent 40 years doing it. Global industrial materials company. Critical materials, precious metals, critical metals, et cetera. We're going to take full advantage of our mining and metallurgical backgrounds for that, too. Now, we have been approached by some really big customers. Could we co-locate a facility? Could we joint venture a facility? There are powerful market reasons to do that, so we're very interested in that.
In those cases, we operate, we control. They're more of a financial/strategic partner, okay. Internationally, it's still a question, how would we best do it? Frankly, we haven't pursued it for two reasons aggressively. We've talked to the Australians, we've talked to the Indians, we've talked to the Europeans, okay. They're interested. We haven't done it for two reasons. One, we have a huge priority. We've got to walk before we could run. As much as we're confident this thing's going to work, it doesn't work until it works. We're going to see it work very soon. Then secondly, how do you control the know-how? How do you control the know-how? We're biased. We don't know, to having joint ventures that we control.
All right, if you have a local partner, you have a local partner for local reasons, strategic local reasons, but we want to control the know-how to the best of our ability. One thing I'll say, though, seven facilities up and running in the United States, even before we're extracting the metals, could generate a lot of cash flow. We can't screw that up. We have to execute on that first before we take it further.
Corrado, we are approaching the top of the hour.
Yeah.
Did you want to give us some final thoughts and we could turn the online viewing audience loose for the day.
Yeah
We could do some follow-up here if we need to.
Yeah. What does top of the hour mean? What time is it?
About 10 minutes away from 11.
Okay. Yeah. Fantastic. We're okay. Here's my final thoughts, right? I'm super excited about you meeting the metals team this afternoon. I want to just reiterate, say hello to Fortunato, say hello to some of the members of the team. Kyle Geddes is our plant manager. He coaches the basketball team for the high school in Silver Springs. Meet the people, ask them good questions, and enjoy the afternoon. When we go through the industrial park, I am going to hand wave all the stuff that I just referred to. You're going to see it with your own hands. Why is that important? Because it directly correlates to the value of the Sierra Springs Opportunity Fund platform. We got an exciting summer ahead of us. Getting the mining assets completed.
To Richard's clarifying question, a lot more clarity coming with Sierra Springs, as we really advance the thing as a combined team. The objectives for metals. If you have one thought in your mind that you want to look forward to is when does Fortunato say, "Hey, I'm extracting silver." Even before, right, we get to the one ton a day pilot facility, we should have some proof of chemistry, some proof of process for extracting silver. That'll be the first metal that we validate we can pull out. A lot's happening from this point forward. The board's locked and loaded. We've done so much work as a board in the last two months. I think maybe it's important to emphasize that in closing. We're going to become a multibillion-dollar global company.
We need to professionalize our management, we need to expand our board, and we need to allocate the work so it's not a one-man show. The only thing that matters is execution. Execute and deliver on the objectives. We're not perfect. Sometimes we're a little late. We're going to do a better job at setting expectations and delivering on those expectations.
All right. Thank you very much, Corrado. Also, go ahead. Applause is very acceptable.