Comstock Inc. (LODE) Earnings Call Transcript

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining Comstock Inc.'s Second Quarter 2026 Results and Business Outlook. I'm Zach Spencer, Treasurer and Corporate Secretary. Today is Thursday, July 23, 2026, we are streaming live and this session is being recorded. A recording will be posted shortly after we adjourn in the Investor Relations section of our website. Today, we filed our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, and issued a press release summarizing quarter end results. Both documents are available on our website. As a reminder, Comstock is listed on NYSE American with the ticker Lode, LODE, -- joining me today are Corrado De Gasperis, Comstock's Chief Executive Officer; and Judd Merrill, Comstock's Chief Financial Officer. After their prepared remarks, we will take questions. We received more than 40 questions in advance of the call. If you have additional questions during the call, please use the Zoom Q&A window, and we are extending this webcast today to address as many questions as possible. Today's discussion will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially due to risks and uncertainties detailed in our SEC filings. Full risk disclosures can be found in our filings on the Investor Relations page and on the SEC website. With that, it is my pleasure to introduce our Chief Financial Officer, Judd Merrill. Judd, you may begin.

Thank you, Zach, and welcome, everyone. I'd first like to briefly touch on this slide. Over the past several months, we've worked intentionally to build a stronger capital base and surround the company with high-quality investors, strategic partners and commercial relationships. We view these relationships as important validation of the progress we've made in our opportunities that are ahead. And before I begin with financial remarks, I'd like to recognize our Board of Directors. We have an exceptionally engaged and experienced independent Board that is actively involved across every aspect of the company's strategy and governance. Our directors are highly focused on disciplined capital allocation. They remain fully informed on our liquidity and cash position and they work closely with management to ensure that we deploy capital carefully and judiciously. This is primarily towards accelerating our metals recycling platform and advancing the monetization of Sierra Springs investment. And then of the Board, there's committees, and each committee is playing an important role as the business evolves. Our audit committee is actively overseeing our financial reporting, risk management and the implementation of controls that support our new Comstock Metals operations. Our compensation committee continues aligning both the annual incentive plans and the long-term equity incentive with shareholder value creation. So that means that these are truly performance-based incentives. And our environmental committee is providing important oversight as we advance first-of-kind permitting and sustainable operations. Now I will move to some comments on the quarter. Our second quarter progress represents another set of important achievements in completing Comstock's transformation. Last quarter, we talked about positioning the company for execution. This quarter, we have begun executing on virtually every major objective we laid out at the beginning of the year. So our balance sheet remains strong. Our business has become significantly simpler and our first industry scale metals recycling facility is ready, and we continue advancing several high-value monetization opportunities, including the sale of the mining assets. The positioning of the sale of our real estate through the now nearly 50% owned Sierra Springs investment. Here are a few financial highlights from this quarter. We ended the quarter with approximately $31.4 million of cash and no debt. We also ended the quarter with total working capital of $39.9 million, reflecting current assets of $58.1 million against lower current liabilities of $18.2 million. We do expect another $20 million in cash in August once we close on the securities purchase agreement and sell 100% of our legacy mining assets to make precious metals that sell -- the mining assets will also remove on mining reclamation liabilities and related bonding requirements and associated costs from our balance sheet. And that's while retaining an upside in both the NSR royalties across the district and retaining meaningful equity in Mackey. And the mining sale will also eliminate annual cost of about $1.4 million and free our capacity to focus more on the recycling business. Our outstanding share count at June 30, 2026, was always slightly changed since we filed our first quarter 10-Q, reflecting only director stock compensation. We are also added to the Russell 2000 and the Russell 3000 indices in late June, and we believe that represents another step in strengthening our institutional capital base. So let me spend a minute and review how we deployed the capital during the first 6 months of the year and some color on why and what these -- what we are investing in. Our largest source of cash this year was our January equity financing, which generated approximately $56 million in net proceeds, but we also generated nearly $6.5 million in additional proceeds and that includes receiving over $2 million in cash from mining asset sales, including the sale of other -- some older royalties, mining rights and the recent discount sale of a note receivable. Received another $1.8 million from debt extinguishment related to recoveries where there was a make-whole provision that resulted in positive funds coming back to us. And then there is 2.6 million solar panel recycling revenue. That's including the deferred revenue from our growing metals operation. And that's where the sales in June and continuing even in this month of July, we're about double the rate that we experienced in May in the prior months, and we're just beginning to bring in larger recycling operations online. On the uses side, virtually all of our investments were intentional growth investments. So let's review those. So approximately $21 million was invested into Sierra Springs, that's enabling and enabled the close of over 2,200 acres of land and nearly 2,000 acre feet of water rights and that effectively consolidated 1 of Northern Nevada is premier industrial land and infrastructure opportunities while simultaneously increasing our ownership in Sierra Springs to near 50% and positioning for major future monetization. We also spent approximately $5 million, completing the first industry scale metals recycling facility. That's including the equipment installation and commissioning another $1.3 million, expanding our product upgrade capabilities, particularly our higher-value glass products and approximately $1.4 million in advancing our new metals recovery technologies and approximately 3 million metals operating costs as we ramp up operations and expand the sales and marketing organization, that's nationally. We are deploying this capital as planned with product upgrade CapEx and metal recovery R&D accelerated on the heels of our January equity offering, we believe its deployment will generate better, higher future operating cash flows for metals. On the operating results, metals buildings during the quarter continue to ramp up, especially in June and now in July, reflecting both activity from our small demonstration facilities together, plus deferred revenue associated with the growing customer and sales collection. And our new storage area is completely graded fenced and ready to open and the total panels on the ground and ready for processing approach 9,000 tons. So with our first industry scale facility being continuous operations in August, we expect revenue to increase -- increasingly transition from decommissioning activities to our industry scale commercial production. Operating expenses remained as expected. Those investments included efforts for commissioning our first industry scale facility, expanding commercial organization, building operating infrastructure, advancing product upgrading capabilities and developing downstream metal recovery technologies. And these are planned investments designed to support multiple future production facilities, not just our first operating facility. So now looking ahead at the objectives for 2026. As we move through the second half of 2026, the financial story begins to change our capital spending associated with the first facility is complete. Our focus now shifts towards operating performance, throughput, customer growth and generating higher and higher revenues. While we're working on that at the same time, we'll complete the monetization of our mining assets monetize opportunities associated with Sierra Springs and our remaining real estate expansion of our metals plant platform into additional locations and refocusing by owning the strategy by advancing commercialization, integrating Hexis and attracting third-party capital. So even after recording this quarter, a noncash nonstrategic impairment, which is part of simplifying and strengthening our balance sheet. The carrying value of our investments increased to approximately $67 million. We are continuing to clean up the balance sheet, maintain a stable liquidity position and remain highly focused on disciplined cash on return investment decisions. So now I will turn it over to Corrado to discuss these corporate and subsidiary objectives in greater detail.

Thanks, Judd. Yes. Appreciate it very much. I think I'm going to give just some color on a lot of what Judd said, maybe some visual. This probably might be the last time we show this slide, but just maybe to segue into real production this was the slide that we had even before we built the demonstration facility. So now today, we've completed all the pilot work -- we then subsequently ran the demo facility for 2.5 years. It's still running because it's effective. We keep processing panels through it. And testing other panels and types of panels that they come through. But remember, the 4 fundamental tenets that we still think are the prime differentiator. We still do not see a competing system that can eliminate all contaminants. We don't see a system that can eliminate all those laminate plastics clues at all. So we can do it very efficiently with no harmful emissions, but we do it effectively, which is the most important thing because eliminating those contaminants allows us to produce clean, salable materials. If they're not clean, if they're contaminated then we're a hazardous waste generator, we don't have a permit to be a hazardous waste generator. We have a permit to be a recycler of clean materials. We do it at an extremely low variable cost. And those things will start to become visible after a quarter or 2 here that very efficient use of natural gas, very efficient use of electricity those are our 2 primary variable costs. It's like 92%, 93% of our variable costs. And we do it at high seed, which makes it scalable. So were effective in terms of the output, and we're effective in terms of our ability to scale. So this cartoon becomes a reality. We now have the induce scale 001, first of its kind, deployed. Now what we've deployed and what we intend to start running immediately here in August, is at about 25% capacity. In August, we will be ramping that up over the course of the month, but we will start feeding panels in the front and getting panels out the back. September, October, November, December, as far as our plans are concerned, we'll be at least 25% capacity. It might be 25% capacity for 4 months, that's very important for us is very important for us that everyone, especially our customers can see this showcase, can see what we're capable of doing and how we're capable of doing it. Very transparent with the money that we spent. Judd mentioned almost all of these numbers, but $12.25 million for that full system that you just saw in that schematic -- we were in -- we were planning to spend $1.2 million, $1.3 million, $1.4 million with NV Energy, they got delayed. We put in our own power generating system for a little bit more than that. But that's portable -- so we've got some nice optionality there. But regardless, we can generate power. We spent a little bit on the fee -- the rolling stock because storage became a critical aspect as all these panels are going to be coming in, and we've created a pretty huge storage capacity right next door. So that's it in a nutshell. I think Judd mentioned a smaller number, but we ended up with the additional add-ons to the Eddy system, spending almost $1.5 million $15 million on the product upgrades. And those product upgrades are immediately effective. They've been completely stress tested. They're fully operating, and it allows us to produce not only high-specification glass for sale and now we have more than enough customers for taking that glass as it comes online. But we also were able to get residual metals and residual materials. And as everybody probably is tired of hearing us right now, we capture it all and we sell at all. So those product upgrades have multiple value enhancements to us and certainly major deriskers. When we raised the money in January, we said we'd spend up to $10 million in metal extraction capacity. This will also be first of its kind, and we're ahead. We're moving very fast on deploying a 1 ton per day metal recovery system this year. That's a pilot, okay? That's a pilot. So 1 tonne a day pilot by the end of this year is what we're really, really pushing hard for. Very important in that process is validating both technically and efficiency-wise, economically, that we can extract and yield high amounts of silver from those industrial tailings that we're producing. That we're doing that. We've engaged third-party resources that are helping us do that. It's currently not being done in Silver Springs. It may end up very well being Silver Springs by the time we're done, we'll see. That would be a 1 ton a day system. So that's not to be confused, right, with 100,000 ton annual capacity that we have now deployed. This is in addition to that. The product upgrades and the up specking of the glass is in addition to the -- so not to be defensive, but we are a few months later than we thought in terms of bringing the big machine online, even though it's imminent now, it's imminent. It's going to be done by the end of this month in terms of full testing and full conditioning and then we will be ramping it up in August. But we also added a 1 ton a day pilot system to the scope of our projects. We accelerated that aspect of what we were doing, and we added the product upgrade. That was by market demand, right? So that -- we responded to the market quickly in terms of glass and certain residuals, and we accelerated our own plans for a pilot. Now you do a pilot for a specific reason. You don't do it for academic reasons, okay? We need to prove out that this will be both technically and economically feasible -- technically means we want to recover all of these materials. We don't see anyone that has done this before with these types of materials. We did submit a grant for this, by the way. Government was like fast and furious in their demands. We submitted it in January. They still haven't awarded it to anybody, but we never intended to wait, right? So even though we're still in the running for some of those monies and it would be wonderful if we got them because they might be in time for the demo. We didn't wait in terms of that capital to start piloting. That's why we raised money in January. So 2026, we're going to spend that extra $2 million and prove out the extraction of silver, hopefully, and get a 1 tonne a day operation that then we can take to the next level in 2027 with what we would call a commercial demonstration system, commercial in the sense that it's 25x scale up, but also in the sense that you build a supply chain around that. It's exactly like we did with our recycling demo facility. This is a picture from the annual meeting. So many of you were there. I think you could see the bus back here. Two reasons I wanted to show this aerial shot. One is where you see cars in the back here or where you see empty space in the front here, those are all covered with solar panels now. I drove around last Thursday through the entire parking lot, and I had to make sure didn't scratch the truck. It's tight. But the good news is now you can see a bird's eye view of the storage area, that will hold easily 25,000 tons of material. I mean, embarrassingly, we're just plugging in the last electrical outlets and installing the toilet and the little supervisor building, and it's up and running. So everything has come together very, very nicely. It's a tremendous amount of work to get all of this done. And it's a really, really -- it's -- this is more than just an industrial scale recycling facility. This is literally our platform and our campus for recycling, for upgrading for piloting and testing the new processes and technologies and for storage. I mean storage brings is really the hub of all of that. And the equipment is all here. It's substantially all installed. There's only 1 or 2 more steps of connectivity and stress testing to go. No fatal flaws. -- supremely advanced scrubbers and air pollution control, you see on the left, highly automated arms. You see on the right, these robotic arms have been stress tested to the point where they've exceeded our expectation. Not by a lot, but our expectations were pretty high. What do I mean by that? And some of you may have seen the videos that were posted the thing that's impressive is that we were able to stress test the loading system for an extended period of time, essentially loading 2 panels every 13.7 seconds. You can time it on the video if you wanted to prove me out. That means we are actually loading a panel faster every 7 seconds. So there's 2 things that are very important there. One, obviously, that brings us to the 3.3 million panels per year capacity that we are looking to affect. This is the constraint of the system. This is -- if the arms aren't moving, then throughput is not flowing. But also -- you can see in the video. It's not grease long, it's not scary fast. It's not like stand out of the way or you're going to get your head taken off. This is a very stable, very methodical, very automated continuous loading. We just don't waste any seconds. We keep doing it. And the metal recovery system, as I mentioned, wasn't even in the original plan. We think -- we thought we were producing the cleanest glass and we were. But then when some of the more sophisticated customers came in, they asked for even cleaner. And so kudos to the team for being so responsive, so dedicated, so knowledgeable that we were able to deploy these systems and have the operation. So we're not just producing high-spec clean glass. We're also recovering some of the metals that some might have thought were inconsequential. And then the 1 ton a day is really designed to be the second maximizer. So we get the clean aluminum, we sell it all. We get the glass, we upgrade it, we clean it, we sell it to various customers. Now you take these industrial tailings, and this is the real development effort. This is the first $2 million and then $8 million to really get to the point where we can be ready to scale this also to industry scale. And so far, everything is coming together. I think if you did the analysis is that in the grand scheme of what we wanted to do, plus what we added on doing, I would say we're on schedule, if not slightly ahead of schedule. So to me, that's kudos to Dr. Vilamagna an incredible team of operators and engineers that just are working their butts off. Many of you met them, of course, as you came to visit the facility. What we're seeing in the market is getting updated. Like we're getting more and more intimate with marketing data. We're doing more and more analysis of the panels that are deployed. We're starting to get very, very specific with all the panels, all the ages, all the dates, all the locations more importantly, engaging the customers and the people that are in there. So there are ranges of possibilities here. It's interesting for us because the age that these things come off are highly sensitive. Everyone's talking about panels lasting 25 years. We know that's not true. We're seeing panels come out anywhere from 14 years to 18 years. We looked at the sensitivities of our database on what if everything came out at 14, which won't happen. What if everything came out at 18 what if things came out higher, when if things came out lower. And we're getting a good handle on these ranges. And we're learning some things. One of the things that we learned is that the ultimate macro scale-up might be a little slower than anticipated. But we're seeing regions like Texas and North Carolina that are actually bigger today than we originally estimated they would be based on the ages. And so we're modifying our views of how we would roll out the rest of the network. Fortuna has come up with some pretty remarkable phasings of our deployments where instead of deploying 100,000 tonnes day 1, you could deploy 25, increase it quickly to 50, increase it to 75% increase it to 100. We haven't made any decisions underneath that. And I think what's important is we won't make any decisions to deploy the next production equipment right, until the first facility is up and running until the first facility is running profitable until it starts scaling up. However, we are site selecting Ohio. We are site selecting Northern Nevada. We are looking in Texas. We are looking on the East Coast. And we're looking at is there a smarter, more intelligent way, to secure market share, minimize the cost of the supply chain, grab those customers and then scale that capital more intelligently. These for us are very, very positive advancements. But there's more deployments across the U.S. than we originally thought. There's -- that means panels already out there. That means panels already that have been in production. You saw that we announced OEM, we got an OEM with Illuminate, remarkable, remarkable customer over a year of working that customer because a competitor had entrenched themselves, but -- we really expressed positively what we thought we could do. And apparently to the customer, that was better than what they thought other people can do. So we're very pleased with that. It's another segment of the market. The Utility segment is the biggest segment of the market. It's the 1 we're doing the most work and analysis on. Sorry about that. And what's even more remarkable is new developments. And normally, when you're an end of life, discipline. New developments are sort of in the back of your mind. They're sort of not on the forefront of your marketing work. But we're seeing breakages in these installations. And again, those are not as persistent as reliable as continuous but they're higher than we would have expected, and we've got a lot of trucks that have come in just from breakages, especially in Texas. So we have not changed any of the foundation or fundamental aspects of our guidance. Silver price is down. So we're keeping a monitor on that. You all heard from us that we don't love the idea of selling our tailings and only recovering portions of the silver value -- so we're excited about accelerating our own metal recoveries. We can't wait to see the results from now. We can't wait to share the results from that. We do see clearly, if you just look at the utility segment, which depending on how you estimate the market could be 60% of the market, could be 65% of the market. We see clearly in the next 4.5 years, a cumulative of 1 million tons coming out. Now we've got analysis depending on those age ranges that says, could be that much in a year. We have analysis that said it could be half that much in a year. The bottom line is we see a lot of coming out in the next 4.5 years. We have a much stronger intimacy as to where they're coming from, and we believe we not be better positioned to lead in this market. A lot of wood to chop, a lot of execution to do. As Judd said, we're expanding our capabilities for all of that purpose. At the end of the day, it comes down to this. finish the commissioning, we're weeks away. We'll be done with those commissioning by the end of this month. We will start feeding panels in, in August. There will be some time before we ramp up to a certain rate, then we'll keep it either steady at that rate or growing from there. We've already upgraded the lines capable of making the high-spec glass. We've already finalized the design of the downstream recovery. We're piloting the heck out of it. We selected site #2. We selected site #3. We're looking in very close to selecting 4. So we're half -- we're more than halfway through the year. We've got more than half of these things done already. But operating a 1 ton a day system okay, ordering that equipment for the second facility, and we're revisiting, as I mentioned, how do we do that? How do we phase that? But we aren't doing it until 1 is up and running to 1 shows us successfully like the ramp that we're expecting to see it. And then more and more of our capacity is being allocated to securing larger and longer-term supply agreements. And as Judd said, the compensation programs are fully aligned to these objectives on an annual basis, and they're fully aligned to our equity values on a long-term basis. I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about Sierra Springs because we deployed a lot of capital this quarter. I'm going to spend a little time talking about Biolium because we're getting good inquiries about it and then we'll open it up for questions if that's good. I think everybody knows we're in a great location. I think the location is great because we're 1 truck day away from about 7 states and 75 million people. And it's an extremely well infrastructured location as the crow flies very, very close to the California border, but with huge industrial expansion happening. The industrial expansion that was happening in Reno, the industrial expansion that was having in this northern part of the industrial park, it's pretty well documented. But when this connecting highway came down to Silver Springs, it didn't just enable Silver Springs. It opened up the entire quadrant. And now what's happening in Northern Nevada is quite remarkable. It's quite remarkable in terms of the quality of companies that are coming in it's quite remarkable in terms of the magnitude of companies that are coming in, and it's even more remarkable in terms of the capital and infrastructure that they're building. When 1 CEO says, we're going to spend $100 billion in the next 10 years. And then within a year of saying that, has 2,600 acres under construction in the Taha Reno Industrial Center and then just secures another 500 right in silver springs they're walking the talk, and feeling it. We're feeling it. These -- this is -- this might be the best kept secret in the nation in terms of these industrial developments, we're fixing the help try to change that. But what we've put together through this vehicle, Sierra Springs, which had always been a novel curious potential monetization of a small percentage of something, it just got much bigger than that. And we've been -- and our Board has been extremely diligent here. Right? -- check the boxes, land is land, infrastructure is infrastructure, okay? But where is the power -- as soon as we were able to step in and secure that power comps changed, values changed, but most importantly, market interest changed. A minimum of 300 megawatts puts you in the major leagues, right? Getting over a gigawatt makes you headline news but we're being very, very pedantic, right, about making sure the readiness is sufficient for these counterparties, okay? And we're in regionally locationally logistically a very, very good place. But even environmentally it's not only a stable dry temperature, which is ideal for the operation of these kinds of facilities. It's extremely safe insofar as national hazards are concerned, earthquakes, tornadoes, -- we don't experience those things in our geography, certainly not like in the rest of the country. So we've put together enough acres and enough power, right, to make it interesting to a lot of people. We looked at the various types of power and how it can be generated from that gas commitment. We've also acknowledged that even though the grid hit a wall, the Green lean project by Nevada Energy bringing 4 gigawatts, right? The only negative concern with Nevada Energy is delay, just taking so much longer. But when you talk to hyperscalers, when you talk to people with serious ambitions about compute and power, there is comfort in the grid. There's comfort in transitioning to the grid. There is comfort in partnering with the grid. And the grid is going to be tremendously complementary to what we're doing in the future in Silver Springs. And the 1 thing that most people don't think about is fiber you have fiber? Do you have transmission of data. We might be in the best location other than being smacked up in Silicon Valley in that context. So we cover it all. Power flatness, geography, climate temperature to put together an offering that we want to monetize, okay? So our goal -- and hopefully, you're feeling it, right? We're getting a lot of inquiry in Q1, we weren't able to say a lot of things because the transactions were being negotiated. The approvals were being sought. Both Boards, Comstock, Sierra Springs, have approved right? This consolidation of everything that you see in front of you, which then allows us to go to market in unison in alignment, right, and really monetize this thing. So people ask me timing. We do think that we will launch this marketing effort later this summer. We do think we will be engaged very, very quickly with a lot of very prominent counterparties. We do think we can structure transactions before the end of the year. But remember, most of these firms will take 90, 120, 150 days of due diligence. We're making sure that regardless of how long that due diligence takes the answers are going to be the answer that they're seeking, okay? We're self disciplined in that regard. And so we don't know when we'd actually monetize. Hopefully, it would be sooner thereafter. Also the power commitments phase, right? We got a lot coming in 2028. We have even more coming in 2030, okay? So we're positioning this thing so that the counterparties see it as very strategic, very significant and very growth-enabling for that. Just lastly, and I'll do this briefly by oleum has been moving forward under the radar, we haven't been speaking about it as much, quite frankly, and hopefully, you see because we're bringing in industrial metals business fully online, it's our #1 priority. Selling our mining assets. That's done. We're weeks away, hopefully, from closing that. The only thing that's holding that up, I think Judd said it is TSX clearance. We talk to them on 2 or 3 times a week basis, everything is going fine with the TSX they just spoke with them yesterday, and we expect this as imminent. Sierra Springs has taken the lion's share of my capacity and now other Comstock resources. We're pleased with the progress. There's a lot that's going on there. But the by Oleum team, following the Refuel acquisition, following the Hexis acquisition, really recalibrated in a much, much more focused, much more realigned way their thesis because their thesis solves the industry's problem. The industry is bottlenecked by feedstock. The industry is bottlenecked by feedstock. There's an abundance of woody biomass in the world. You've heard us say that because lean times. But the abundance of woody biomass when it's diverse, disparate and all over the place makes it very, very difficult to build and deploy capital unless you have reliable, consistent long-term offtake agreements for feedstock, acquiring Hexis solve that problem. We now have -- we now have the technology, the capability, the feedstock to ultimately deliver the fastest-growing, highest-yielding, lowest carbon, lowest cost solution that you see right in front of you, that can be converted with our facilities in Madison, Wisconsin, which you see right in front of you, which will allow us to control the integration of this farm to fuel platform so that when you are looking at site selection, you can put it where it's reliable, where you want it to be and it can be fully integrated. You won't be dictated by the unreliability of these various feedstocks. Can we convert waste wood, Yes. Will there be opportunities to do it? Yes. But it's convenience for us. It's a bonus for us. It's an enhancement for us because we've integrated a solution that's better, and it's much better. The fact that you can grow a perennial crop, that means you don't have to plan it every year that has the highest yielding tonnage of any known usable biomass in the industry. Okay, where it grows even on marginal land, where food isn't capable where it's already been EPA approved as a feedstock where we can leverage existing farming infrastructure. It was designed for that purpose. I mean, basically, describe it as a corn stock and a bamboo stock having a baby. And there's no vegetable it grows in marginal climate, it grows fast. It grows strong, and it has a strong liking content. It was almost tailor-made for this marriage. You combine that crop with our process technologies, our conversion technologies. And I would say the world's leading lignocellulosic team, you can produce more fuel or per acre of land than anything that even comes close. Having said that, you can produce many, many other things with this feedstock and an interesting pull that we have right now is Hexis being able to sell solutions and sell feedstocks to others, and we expect that's going to be happening in the short term. This is not a slide that I want to cover here. But basically, what is relevant to know is from everything that Marathon did with their Virant technologies, taking sugars to fuels and sugar to oils, everything that Renfuel did is verifying and making oils from lignin. -- everything that NREL, MIT and these others have been doing to advance lignocellulosic solutions for fuels. And everything Hexis has done to frankly unblock the true bottleneck in the industry, we've amalgamated into 1 system, into 1 company, into 1 solution. We have it. We have it all in 1 place. So we're not any less excited. We're disappointed at the speed that things move forward. We're disappointed some of the readiness that we thought was in place that wasn't in place. We're being transparent and frank about it. We're downsizing. We're streamlining primarily because we're focusing on the solution that actually is integrated, primarily because we're focusing on the solution that actually works, okay? And it's going to be commercializing, we will have -- I believe we will have revenues in 2027 other than from Biolium-generating fuels. So we'll have -- we won't have any revenue from Biolin Generg fuels. We'll have revenue from Biolin generating materials for fuels will have revenues from Hexis, and that will be very exciting for us. But we're also getting and continue to be approached by the leading government and the leading university and leading technical segments of the market, to want to partner with us on this solution. It's very proud to say the national lab of the Rockies and MIT is our partner, and we have exclusive exclusivity of that tech, and we're advancing it, but more are coming soon in terms of those partners and with grants and with money that will come with that as well. So we do expect revenue. We expect it next year. We expect to be able to raise capital both dilutive and from third parties at the subsidiary level, also nondilutively for lode shareholders before the end of this year. Now we're realigning, we're recalibrating and then we'll move forward to that end, hopefully very soon. and this is the famous summary, hasn't really changed materially other than we're seeing an amalgamation in Silver Springs to the extent that all we were able to -- I think Judd mentioned it, it's not a small fee. Our increase to almost 50% of Serra Spring's opportunity fund was coincident with funding them closing on 157 parcels of land, representing over 2,000 acres of land, representing over 2,000 acre feet of water rights. That's all owned now. No big obligation, no big monkey in the back, right? That's owned. We own half of it, plus our properties. When you put those together into 1 thing, it's highly valuable and that's what we're going after. So I think, Zach, it's good. Let's turn to questions if that's okay.

Thank you, Corrado. As I mentioned at the beginning of the call, we received more than 40 questions prior to the call. And I can see we have a number of additional questions coming through Zoom, right? Corrado and Judd, our first question is does Comstock Inc. expect adjustments in the number of outstanding shares.

Yes. So in the number of outstanding shares, no. But if that question is talking about future issuances of shares for equity raises or anything like that. as we've talked about, a lot of the CapEx spend is behind us, we got first facility funded paid for second facility, well-funded the R&D activity is well funded. So we are just focused now on executing and that's our focus is just getting that up and running. We also have some additional dollars coming in from the mining asset sales. So we remain strong on our balance sheet and be able to fund the future.

Thank you for that, Judd. Our next question is how long until this company starts making money.

Well, so I mean, we have been making money from the pilot operations. We will start making additional as we ramp up the plant. But I think the question really probably is more about like when do we start getting cash flow positive. And we've always talked about plant number one. Once we reach 20 to 20-plus percent, we're generating cash from an operation standpoint. And if we think about company-wide, once we start hitting that 40%, 50% of operations just from plant #1, we're covering all the costs and we start generating cash, and that's not too far off.

Going specifically to Comstock Metals, here is a 2-part question. Which company is Comstock's most significant competitor how will Comstock be able to gain and keep enough business to become and stay profitable.

I'll take that one. So I think starting from the second and going backwards, maybe, Zach, like the panels are out there. Like our -- I mentioned it earlier, like our studies show the panels are out there. We now know more intimately. We've always known a lot. I don't want to make it sound like we're just seeing this stuff for the first time. Absolutely not. But we've hired independents to assess it. We've cross reference on our database. We get more and more data all the time. I think the most important thing is just being engaged with customers directly, walking the field, talking about what their problems are talking about how they're dealing with their problems. And we're -- these are the big ones, like RWE, like NextEra, like the Florida lighting power is like these are the big ones. We have a good national handle on it. I think that the answer to the question is we solved their problem like we solve their problem. They have an environmental issue first. We solve it completely. We extinguished that liability, and we do it expediently. Secondly, we can scale to the magnitude of their problem. Now that's not as evident to everybody today, right, because the panels are starting to come out, they're coming out faster, they're coming out in bigger quantity, but it's getting bigger. How fast that grows is still not the easiest thing to predict. As I mentioned earlier, you run the models now with 18-year lives versus 20-year lives versus 16-year lives, dramatically different result in the near term. Once we get through 2030, 2031. -- it starts to really -- it starts to concentrate because there are so many. So I think it's -- we keep doing what we're doing in terms of how effectively we engage these customers. Now in terms of competition, and I mean this humbly, right? It's aggravating to us that people still will exploit like the glue poles and the regulations, the inconsistencies and regulations, send things to landfills. We see sometimes material gets hidden in auto fluff and tries to get passed off as solid waste. We see people shredding things we would say irresponsibly, right? Because all that to the hazardous, the Cadium and the lead and the Lels, it's all stuck to it and ship it overseas. Technically, by the letter of the laws and the right manifesting, that's not allowable. And practically, we're seeing it get stopped when it is discovered. We are. But it's still happening. So we feel competitor is probably the wrong word. The alternatives that are still being exploited are implicating to us, right? We're not getting those panels coming to our system. Once we have our big machine up and running, as we improve our ability to effectively communicate these issues throughout the organizations we're talking to, not just the field operators, not just the engineering firms that are deploying and/or decommissioning these fields not just to the directors of HEP, but the C-suite, the C-suites of these companies that's what we're doing. Like that -- the penetration of that come it's a nascent industry. It's new. A lot of this is new to people. When you talk about actual competitors, and I'm not this is not being disparaging or disrespectful at all. To fundamentally said, we do not see anyone who has a science-based solution that can effectively generate clean materials and scale, we don't see it. Right? So when you're operating a 5,000 tonne a day demo, there's 2 or 3 or 4 people you can point to that are doing similar things. When you're operating 100,000 I'm sorry, 5,000 ton a year demo, we were operating a 3.3 million panel ton a year system that can scale, that is scale, that is cleaning glass, that is recovering metals that is -- we don't see anybody -- I don't even see anybody that's actually trying to do that, right? So I think that we feel we're spending less time looking sideways and we're spending more time just engaging the customers and it's working.

Thank you, Corrado. I have 2 questions again, but it's just 1 topic. The first facility should have been operational in June Is it still the case? Our operations still expected to start early in August.

Right. So yes, there's overlapping there. I don't want to repeat myself too much. We will be done testing the oven by the end of July. So last piece of the equation, okay? We're very, very familiar and confident with the ovens, all the gas lines, gas hookups. They're all in place. They're all connected electrical. So it will be done by the end of July. In August, we will start feeding a panel in the front and material coming out the back, keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it. There's a little bit of okay, you're running the whole thing altogether, a week or 2, get all that. How is it working, some of the new employees, some of the training, somebody there, okay, somewhere in August, not too far a week or it's going to be running at a certain level and it's now going to stop. Now I said earlier, yes, it's a month or 2 later than we had hoped. We didn't ever expect to have a full class upgrade system in place and already operating. We didn't even think that we would start on the metal extraction until August of this year. Okay? We change those plans and pulled everything forward. In 1 case, because of the market and the second pace because the government prompted us and we're thankful because now we're ahead of that curve. So I just feel like by the end of this year, when all 3 things are running, we will be ahead of our original schedule. Not that it's that important if we're a little ahead or a little behind just in fairness, right? We're doing more than we originally thought we would at this point.

What are the potential revenue and profit margins from the Illumina agreement?

So we wouldn't ever disclose that, right? The thing that's positive about having OEMs, right, is that there's a lot of material that gets scrapped and wasted, maybe not relatively a lot to them, but it's a lot to us that gets scrapped and wasted in all forms, right? So we're not necessarily getting full broken solar panel, we could, right? You could break 1 at the end of the assembly process. But we're getting other types of scrap materials that are very enhancing to our metal yields, right? So it's very complementary, and we like it. And it's a very strong -- the relationship is getting stronger and stronger. So we like in. Of course, we have a site in Ohio, and I didn't say I may have heard me not have said earlier, but that's how sinupwith panels too, right? So we're happy that we opened that site when we did.

Thank you, Corrado. Are you going to have sufficient panels to satisfy 3 shifts in the new big plant? What about the second plant?

So that's a good question. Right? The -- it's not -- it's a good question for a different reason. The efficiencies of our variable costs, the relatively very low amount of human labor required to monitor the system as it's operating. Obviously, you've got to load panels on the front end. You've got to unload super sacs on the back end, okay. Make it most economical to run the system continuously once it starts up. So you could run the trade-off analysis, but at 25% operating capacity, you're running the system for all the time. Like we're not -- we don't need -- we're going to be running it full all the time, essentially starting in August, okay. So the answer to that question is this a very, very low breakeven threshold for 1 of these facilities, as Jon mentioned. And it is not only unlikely, it's not ideal operationally that you wouldn't run 1 shift. It doesn't work that way, right? It's going to -- once those up in turn on, they're going to keep running. It's very efficient to do it that way.

At pivoting to biolium. Will we get more regular updates on the technology developments? And how should we interpret the Q2 impairments?

So the impairments, Jud, I think, made a point that they were noncash, nonstrategic, right? Nonstrategic means there was intellectual property associated with the acquisition. Most of that was done as a stock acquisition that it's a very interesting technology. It's not -- it doesn't have -- we don't have any role for the technology and the goal of the company. So it's difficult to justify keeping that asset on your balance sheet and amortizing it over 20 years. It just doesn't make any sense. So we impaired it. We don't -- we think the impact that it has in our business is like Okay. So that became apparent as we realigned and focus by Oleum on its 1 true goal. And I do think you'll be hearing more updates, right, in part because both Hexis and the team together are active in the market. You're going to see some commercial things. I think you're going to hear some technology developmental things that are both new and evolving. They have a dedicated team. They're working hard, right? They separated last May, and we were less involved in the day-to-day. That shouldn't be interpreted to mean we're not as excited. They frankly, we're gearing up to raise capital, and it became apparent that getting realigned, getting tightened around this incredible thesis of farm to fuel was important to be done, like get it done, right? So if that context once that all gets done, hopefully, in the next 45, 60 days, then we could look back out into the market. My confidence level of being able to raise capital directly into by oleum like we did last May is very high. It's very high. So I think it's very high with the right plan. It's very high with the rate story, and we have it. So it's just taking a little longer. Disappointing, I want to be clear, disappointing disappointment is I said it at the annual meeting, I'll say it again, okay? But no less excited about the potential.

Corrado, you also answered the next 3 questions on -- so let me go to the next question on Biolin. And that is what is the status of the Bioleum capital raise?

Yes, I think -- I kind of just said that, Zach, right? So a pause, resume September, October, high confidence.

Okay. And that's followed by -- at what point does Comstock need to start giving cash to buy Olin to keep it going.

So if there's some bridging that needs to happen between now and then, we're looking at that. And it's in our best interest, I think, to do that. And we'll be, as Jeff said, extremely judicious, right, with our money and also very safe, like it would be -- it would almost certainly be bridge loan type of a notion more equity like we're ready for them to be capital independent.

Thanks Corrado most of the questions that are coming in are on Comstock Metals. So this pivot back to Comstock Metals. How robust is your solar panel process to an unexpected power or natural gas outage. And this person is asking that because they've seen cases where early plants run into issues due to an unexpected power outage causing damage to sensitive equipment.

Yes, that's a good question. So I think -- look, I think in the SSO presentation, I showed like were a location. It's -- we don't have any kind of history of those kind of natural disasters. Having said that and interestingly, we have electrical power to the plant with Nevada Energy. We actually -- we're trying to upgrade that electrical capacity. That didn't work. So we essentially put natural gas generated electricity in place. But you could kind of think of as portable mobile and/or redundant, right? So it's not full redundancy, but there's a bit of redundancy there if something should happen, which we don't expect, right? So I think the -- and we got we bought 2 generators, not one, right? So we actually have a lot of power capacity in place and some redundancy with the grid. I'm not suggesting we have complete in total redundancy but we have a lot of redundancies. So I don't see a scenario where the plant would go down, right? But I do see a scenario where if the world ended, we may be operating something less than full I think we're well protected is probably the simple answer.

Has Comstock Metals made progress in offtake agreements and license agreements.

Lots of offtake agreements, okay? I think the thing that's probably clarifying there is we're signing a lot of agreements, but that doesn't mean -- and we're signing a lot of agreements with a lot of big companies. That doesn't mean every big company has a lot of panels today. So I think I've said in the past, like you could have a scenario where a customer base could deliver 25,000 tons a business in a year. And then 4 years from now, that same exact base could be 5x or 10x that number depending on what region they are, what the age of the panels are and how they scale, we're getting more and more intimate with that today. So I think that -- I feel like we're leading in market penetration and securing these customers. I think that the thing that maybe is a little deceiving is securing a customer doesn't mean that you have 100% of the maximum amount of business that they would give you the first day, right? Because their business is the maturation of those panels, right? It's like when they come to end of life. So their needs today are much smaller than their needs in the future, right? But I think people will have a better feeling about that in October, November, December, January, right? We start to see flows and they're not going to be sunamis. They're going to come. We're going to keep layering them on. We're going to get new customers. There will be more panel flow. To Judd's point, 45%, 50% will be in a happy place. We won't be satisfied like we won't be satisfied. But when we see those kind of ramp-up starting, then we'll start thinking about how do we, again, judiciously deploy in Southern Nevada in Ohio, in Texas, maybe with less capacity to start that kind of idea.

What ramp-up should investors expect going into year-end?