All right. Hello everyone, and thank you all for continuing to join us throughout the day here at the Lytham Partners Fall 2026 Investor Conference. My name is Robert Blum, Managing Partner at Lytham Partners. Up next, we have the Chief Executive Officer of Comstock, ticker symbol of LODE, Corrado De Gasperis, who is going to be walking through the company's slide presentation. Corrado, thanks so much for participation. The floor is all yours.
Robert, thank you and Lytham for having me. Appreciate it very well. Looking forward to giving everyone an update here on the progress and advancements, some of which are very meaningful, that Comstock has over the last three or four months. Before I start, I just would like to say that there is always a risk of making forward-looking statements. Please make sure that that information and that knowledge is treated appropriately and in consistent with all legalities as it pertains to investment decisions. I'm presenting today by myself. You'll see that Judd Merrill, our CFO, is also listed at the end of the presentation, and both of us are always happy to engage and update and provide information for our investors. I guess I'd start off just by saying that for most intents and purposes, our capital allocation, our focus, and our dedication is in renewable metals.
I think most people know by now that we started off as a hard rock mining, silver and gold mining company. Those assets have been sold. The cash from those sales have gone into our treasury, and we are now advancing new technologies and accelerating the commercialization of these impactful technologies, primarily in the category of renewable metals. We also have investments in renewable fuels and in a pretty remarkable powered land platform that is in an entity called Sierra Springs Opportunity Fund, Inc. Comstock Metals' progress is the one that's broken through. We're going to be pleased to tell you today that we've just recently announced that our industrial-scale solar panel recycling facility is operating. It's operating continuously. That means 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That puts us into this TRL-8 category for innovative technologies.
Getting from technology readiness level 3, 4, 5, even 6 into 7 and 8 is considered a pretty significant achievement. The term dying or stalling in the valley of death really refers to people who can't quite get industrial scale, can't quite get commercial scale. What's really wonderful is we're there. We're there. People have been waiting to hear this. We're telling you today, we've communicated it publicly that we are up and running with a breakthrough technology that has remarkable impact. We are also moving forward with our other investments and platforms to that same end, of which, as I mentioned, Sierra Springs Opportunity Fund will be part of this update. But most importantly, metals. We really have deployed now a technology that we don't believe has been replicated. We do not see anybody even meaningfully attempting to replicate it, and it's got some powerful characteristics.
The most important is that we can eliminate all contaminants very efficiently. That means an extremely low variable cost. That means complete elimination of the contaminants. That means the production of clean materials that can be resold. It also means that we're not generating hazardous waste, and we are eliminating the liability that comes with that hazardous material for our customers. The ability to do it efficiently, low cost, effectively, meaning completely, and then expediently. The fact that we can process at very high speeds, loading a panel every seven seconds or less means that we can scale it. And since there's such a significant amount of panels deployed over 1 billion, the fact that they're rapidly coming to end of life, it positions us to be able to solve the problem for our customers and for our industries. We will repeat, we're up and running.
We're running 24/7. We're running at scale, and we're running in a way that we do not see any other company currently being able to do. This is what that system looks like, and it's sophisticated, it's stable, it's operating, and it's advanced. And you see in the center four lines, four ovens, as you see delineated there by the arrows. Those ovens literally represent each 25% of the system's overall capacity. The overall capacity is 3.3 million panels per year, and 25% of that comes from one of those ovens, 100%, of course, from all of those ovens. We've already started designing the second facility. We are not deploying that capital yet. We have not pulled the trigger on doing that yet, but we are getting remarkable success with customers in the Mid-Atlantic, the Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana area.
We've already designed the second facility, and the design of that facility is intended to scale up a little slower. What do you see here? You see one oven, not four ovens. But mark my words, it's exactly the same system. It's exactly the same process, and ultimately, we would want to scale it up to four ovens expediently. We're positioning ourselves for intelligent capital deployment. We're positioning ourselves for rapid scale-up, and frankly, we're positioning ourselves to really be the leader and the winner in this market. Once those recycling facilities are deployed, we will be producing across the country, we would be producing clean aluminum, clean glass, and these mineral-rich or silver-rich tailings. Now, we're already doing that in Nevada, so that's wonderful. And we look forward to doing it in multiple locations across the country. Ultimately, five would be ideal.
But we're also concurrently working on our ability to recover metals from those tailings. That maximizes the value by not only being able to cleanly produce aluminum, cleanly produce glass, but ultimately extract from the tailings, silver, copper, silicon metals, silica, and in some cases, even rarer materials. That really positions a double differentiation. Not only are we the fastest, highest scale as cleaning recycler of these solar panels and materials, but then we can become the only company that's taking those tailings and actually extracting the higher value and higher yielding metals from that outcome. We've completed a massive storage facility right next to our production facility, which is now operating. And this lower picture gives you the best bird's eye view of where we would store panels in advance of processing them.
Our goal, obviously, is to process them as soon as they arrive, but with the increasing market and the magnitude of what's coming, because of some regulatory constraints about prohibiting the storage of panels in the exact location that you process them, we have a near adjacent storage for super efficient material handling and logistics. We also have the most advanced environmental controls. We really don't see our process generating anything more than CO2 and water vapors. Should there be particulates, should there be opacity, we capture it in our scrubber, which you see to the left. If you're loading a panel every seven seconds, ultimately, automating that is critical. So you see very sophisticated robotic arms that give us the ability not only to load a panel every seven seconds, but sustain that continuously 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
You see, we don't only have one, we have sort of a twin-turbo notion here where we've got two robotic arms simultaneously feeding the system. We've showed videos of that happening when we were able to actually achieve the speed that was necessary for the scale that we've designed. That was a remarkable relief. We spent quite a bit of time taking the raw glass that you see. That raw glass in the left-hand lower picture is clean of contaminants. So that was our first success. Some of our customers were saying, "Well, there's still some metals residual in those materials." So we took those raw glass extrusions, and we separated the metals.
You see, we still recover a small amount of metals from those materials, but now we achieve the specifications that our largest customers are looking for in terms of reprocessing clean glass. This is the bird's eye view of the entire facility. You see the big plant, you see the small plant, you see a lot of solar panels in the parking lot. We're now fixing to process those all out, issue our customers certificates of destruction. This is the best view of all that storage that you see in the triangular shaped parking lot, in this picture just above the facility. Lastly, with the facility running continuously, the substantial majority of our efforts continues to and increases the focus on the market. What you see here is a previous map of where we saw the largest opportunities.
The bigger the bubbles, the older the panels that we targeted, hence, California, Arizona, Nevada dictated a Nevada facility to be the best position logistics to capture that market. We like Ohio, we like North Carolina, we like Florida, we like Texas, in terms of where we see other panels coming to end of life. Quite frankly, they've come to end of life in those jurisdictions sooner to some degree than we were even expecting. So we're currently shipping materials from across country to us. That tells us that there aren't a lot of good recycling alternatives for our customers looking for that. They're willing to ship across country. Sometimes there's a temporarily higher cost for us to do that. We're willing to do that if it means national accounts, key customers, and important market share.
But when we look at what evolves, the deployments that are accelerating and occurring in Texas and frankly, throughout the country, is really remarkable. We not only have a very large amount of deployments today that are coming end of life, we also have more and more deployments happening. We really feel like getting this facility up and running was a huge achievement. We have talked about getting it up to about 25% operating rate. We want to run it at that rate for a number of months, prove unequivocally not just its ability, its stability, but its unit economics, and then just grow that market through 2027, through 2028, and continue to deploy this solution across the country. In terms of Sierra Springs, just briefly, I want to highlight that we are sitting in a remarkable geography.
The geography is remarkable not only because of Nevada economic advantages, tax advantages for being there, but also federal advantages of Opportunity zones. We are attracting a lot of interest in this area, both in terms of capital and company. It is remarkably safe. There is no coincidence here that the companies that you see listed are operating in this jurisdiction because of the climate environmentally, because of the climate economically, and because of the safety and the stability of deploying there. We do not know of any major technology company that has not considered it, and most have chosen it. We like that very well. When the state built a connecting highway that effectively connected Reno down to Silver Springs, it really put us on the map infrastructurally. Everything became connected.
We watched as every one of these major companies that are listed and demonstrated here filled up the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, where massive development continues. But now watching companies like Microsoft and like Tract show up at our doorstep in Silver Springs, breaking ground now. With a lot of the opposition that you are hearing across the country about AI or about data centers, it is really reassuring to us that we are in counties and states that are welcoming this kind of development and working very hard to bring them here in the best and most responsible ways. That is really the short update. We are very much looking forward to the Lytham conference and answering questions one-on-one with all the interested investors. Thank you, Robert.
Fantastic. Corrado, thank you so much for your participation here and everybody, of course, for watching. If there are additional questions or would like to schedule a meeting here with Comstock, send me an email that is blum@lythampartners.com. Of course, to learn more about Lytham, make sure you visit our website, follow us on LinkedIn and subscribe to us on YouTube to stay connected about future events. Again, Corrado, thanks so much. Have a great conference.
You too. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.