Comstock Inc.

Investors, analysts, and other stakeholders to Comstock's 2024 Annual Results and Business Update. This is Trevor Brucato with RB Milestone Group, Comstock's U.S.-based investor relations firm. Comstock is listed on the NYSE American under the symbol L-O-D-E, and I'm pleased to have with me the company's Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chair, Corrado DeGasparis, and Chief Operating Officer, Billy McCarthy. I'd like to first thank those who submitted questions during registration. Most of those will be addressed in management's prepared remarks. If you have any new questions throughout the presentation, please submit them in the Q&A module and we'll do the best we can to get to all of them. Today's presentation may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that may be out of Comstock's control and should not be construed as a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any security. For the company's full disclaimer, please visit comstock.inc. Also, RB Milestone is not a registered investment advisor or broker-dealer. For more information on us, please visit rbmilestone.com. Lastly, this presentation is being recorded today, March 6, 2025, and will be made available on the company's website at comstock.inc shortly after today's event. And now, it is my pleasure to turn it over to Comstock's Executive Chair and CEO, Corrado De Gasparis. Corrado, the stage is yours.

Thanks, Trevor. And hello, all, and welcome to Comstock's 2024 Annual Update. I have no doubt that in the very near future, when we look back on our achievements from last year, 2024 will have marked the turning point of almost everything we're doing, and certainly so for metals and fuels. As of today, both companies have achieved their previously published objectives for 2024. And let me recap it for Comstock Metals first, where Fortunato and the team have advanced our solar cycle recycling technology all the way through TRL 7, and it's now fully operating. This facility was designed, deployed, and commissioned just under a year ago and quickly ramped up with a now dedicated team of 13 full-time employees. The plan has proven it can recover 100% of all the metal, glass, and minerals, especially the silver-rich tailings. This has not only created a tremendous competitive advantage by enabling us to offer a zero landfill solution to our customers, but it also increases our revenues beyond the tipping fees by almost 50%. We were very conservative in that notion of offtake until we knew we could produce those products cleanly, completely. So now we're rapidly expanding our existing customer base with industry leaders that hopefully will soon be able to disclose who they are to you. Adding to that, in 2024, the team also finalized the design and site selection for our first industry-scale facility and submitted the Nevada county and state permits for approvals. We already received the county permit that allows us to efficiently store panels and this means that the state permitting wait times do not meaningfully slow down our ability to secure and receive orders from our customers. Although our largest customers are in the Southwest United States region, in 2024, not only did we secure customers throughout the Southwest region, we also won business far beyond, including securing and receiving panels from Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and even Alberta, Canada, just to name a few. And just to be crystal clear, We're now receiving panels at the facility every single week. In 2024, we also secured offtake revenue arrangements for all of those clean product lines. That is the aluminum scraps, the glass pearls, and those silver rich tailings. Our 2024 metal segment performance was right where we hoped it would be. And we are now realizing and positioning for all types of exceptional revenue growth in 2025. The intake revenue, the offtake revenue, and even decommissioning services well before we commission the larger facility. I'll talk more about that after Billy's review of the financials. But suffice to say now that we have a legitimate view of how we're engineering and operating what is effectively a world-class silver mine, one that uses solar panel waste as its feedstock ores, and one that effectively never depletes. Let me turn to Comstock Fuels. Many of you have already acknowledged in speaking to me that you realized in 2024 that fuels has become something far greater or was becoming something far greater than what most people expected, understood, or frankly, even conceived was possible. Those conversations bring me joy because we've always talked about our systemic notion, and it means a lot of things, profound things, but we were building something that was always intended to expand beyond the legal borders of the actual company, the actual legal entity. And I have to take a deep breath before I run through 2024 on Fuels With You because we did a lot. During 2024, our teams have integrated critical technologies. They integrated critical partners and even geographies into a truly new and unprecedented Biolium enterprise. And what I'm about to explain really tells us why. Because we first assembled our system from a foundation of new technologies lignocellulosic IP that was developed in large part and consolidated further by our team. And then by identifying, aligning, securing, and integrating an expansive portfolio of the world's leading intellectual properties, as well as the world's leading intellects, you know, the scientists, the engineers, the technologies and the people and their teams who together so far have executed exclusive and near exclusive agreements that either dramatically de-risk or push our already industry leading yields of 125 gasoline gallon equivalents per ton of dry wood all the way up to 140 gasoline gallon equivalent tons per ton of dry, I'm sorry, gasoline gallon equivalent per ton of dry wood, which is easily double our next competitor. Nobody is taking waste wood, woody biomass, the most abundant feedstock on the planet Earth and unleashing that carbon to this magnitude in liquid fuels? Nobody. We secured the lowest cost and most abundant feedstock. We secured the highest leading and yielding processes, certainly the lowest or some of the lowest carbon impact or CI scores, which means highest revenue potential. while lining up strategic capital, strategic offtake, and what's turning out to be very tactical and strategic, which is jurisdictional grants and supports from states like Oklahoma and Wisconsin and others now lining up to commit to us. But it doesn't stop there. The team also executed international licenses for engineering services, for process technology, and equity agreements for already five biolum refineries, including Australia, Vietnam, and Pakistan, with New Zealand and Malaysia right on their heels, right in their crosshairs. And in addition to inventing, integrating, and now deploying that platform globally, now deploying that platform globally, the team has secured $3 million in incentive awards from Oklahoma's Quick Action Closing Fund and already earned the first million by committing to Oklahoma as our headquarters. We've also completed preliminary engineering now. Our chief engineer has been working his butt off. We've completed the engineering for our first commercial demonstration facility. And we're very, very close to picking the first site in Oklahoma, which will then earn us a second million dollars from that Oklahoma grant. Remarkably, our team also has secured $152 million allocation of qualified private activity bonds from Oklahoma State Treasurer. This tax-free bond allocation is a huge, Very huge and very rare allocation and not something that's done lightly. The state only gets a certain amount allocated to them to then turn around and allocate to the opportunities that they want to be active in their state. But our guys got it. Together, our team and Marathon Petroleum's team, working tirelessly, I can tell you, for the last six, seven, eight weeks, also closed on the first tranche of our strategic Series A investment with both a cash component, $1 million, and the contribution of Marathon's state-of-the-art renewable fuel demonstration facility in Madison, Wisconsin, which we valued at $13 million with them. that we believe will soon integrate with our Wausau, Wisconsin capacity to create a fully integrated pilot system that goes from validating testing and receiving feedstocks in Wausau to producing barrels of oil and fuel up to two barrels a day in Madison. This enables us to obtain ASTM product approvals, EPA pathway approvals, and even product sales. It will massively shorten the lead times to sales for our Oklahoma facility as product approvals would be accelerated. But probably the largest value that seems to be misunderstood regarding this world-class facility is that it would have taken us years. If we could have even done it, it would have taken us years to establish a facility like this. And I want to tell you that we've tried on a number of occasions to plan and solve for how do we get Wausau producing this kind of oil, this kind of fuel, two barrels a day? How do we do it? And the answer was, it wasn't possible in that facility. When I walk into the Madison facility, I think it's ridiculous that we were even trying to do it in the Wausau facility. It's so much more expansive and involved. But if we had to build those things ourselves, even if we were fully funded on day one, we wouldn't have been able to do it. It would have taken years. And now we have it today. I mean, we have it today. I mean, I'll be working there all next week. These last two accomplishments cannot be understated. Marathon has not only agreed to invest in fuels, Comstock fuels, not only agreed to collaborate on biofuel technology by committing to joint product development agreement with us, and agreeing to offtake for our first facility. But they also capped our fuels valuation for this part of the transaction with them at $700 million. $700 million. The agreement reads and accurately represents that value as a cap for them. But you all need to understand, but to me, It represents the floor for everyone else. Because you can be damn sure that Marathon, after two years of incredibly hard and good work, often being pretty patient with us, frankly, and culminating in these four landmark transactions, is going to get a discount from us at 700 million. Not on 700 million. at 700 million. So Marathon's $14 million investment at 700 million is 2% of Comstock Fuels. We're very, very proud of that. And both parties are going to be very, very happy with that. We plan on finishing the Fuel Series A during the second quarter. And then we'll be in a whole different state of reality as a company. We've truly created an unprecedented, extremely high yielding, extremely low carbon, and in many scenarios, especially with Hexis on board, carbon negative, sustainable global biofuel system that now includes owning this fully integrated pilot that can produce oils and fuels. And more importantly, the systems designed to scale. In every way it's designed to scale, in the abundance and availability of feedstock, in the engineering of the refineries, in the modular scalability in the refineries, in the licensing and deployment with partners, enabling us to effectively create endless oil wells that until now were seemingly hidden in plain sight. I don't think anybody other than maybe a handful of our people who spend 20 hours a day just thinking about nothing but this system appreciates what's about to happen with it. Just quickly with mining, we partially monetize the Northern District claims with nearly 3 million in cash. Those 3 million in cash proceeds, which we've already received from leasing those Northern claims midway through 2023, through the sale when we got another million that was put down towards a nearly $3 million sales price, will result and end up in us monetizing These, let's call them non-producing, non-productive assets for $6 million. These are claims to the North that we never and still have no plans, and I don't think we'd ever have any plans, frankly, for developing. During 2024, though, we did update our preliminary mine reclamation plan for the Dayton using $2,300 gold. The cash flows are robust. The net cash flows over a six-year period from this one resource is nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. It goes well over 2,900 today. That easily adds another 120 million to that cash flow model if we didn't change the cutoff. If you raise the price, you're gonna lower the cutoff. Even if we didn't lower the cutoff, meaning no additional ounces, we'd still get another 120 million added to the cashflow. And our intention is to monetize these assets in a manner that unlocks the most value. Okay, that could be a sale. It could be a joint venture. We could put them into production. As far as we're concerned, we have every option on the table. The mining segment covers its own costs. We have a free option on gold and silver. We couldn't be more bullish about those metals. The spinoff could also bring maximum attention back onto the metals and the precious metals in our portfolio. Understanding that Comstock Inc., and I'm not saying we're changing the name, don't jump ahead, Comstock Inc. effectively is Comstock Metals with the spin. Just like I said in my shareholder letter in January, we end up with a Nevada-based metals and mining company and an Oklahoma-based fuel company. So I didn't mean to confuse people. I know that there's some details that are still missing. Try to fill in as many of the gaps as we can today. But what I want to do is turn it over to Billy to walk us through our financial progress during Q4 and the year. Put a lot of stuff behind us in 2024. Got a lot of things accomplished in 2025. We'll give a little bit of financial expectation for 2025 as well. Then he'll turn it back to me to talk about the outlook for the businesses for the rest of the way. Billy?

So thanks, Corrado. I'm glad to be here to share financial update and talk some more about how we're positioning for the year ahead with regards to capital. All the 2024 results discussed here can be found in today's Form 10-K filing, which you can find on our website, comstock.inc slash investors. On February 24th, we affected a 1 for 10 reverse split of the Lode common stock. As reported on our 10K filing, there are currently 24,238,453 shares outstanding with 245 million shares authorized. We want to say thank you to all the shareholders for the overwhelming support in approving this action, which is critical to our ability to go fast, building more sustainable value in 2025 and beyond. Our revenues grew in 2024 to 3 million from $1.3 million in 2023. 401,000 of that increase related to operations of our solar panel recycling facility, which was commissioned in the first half of 2024, and our decommissioning services business, which started to hit stride at the end of Q3. At year end, there was an additional $152,000 in deferred revenue, where we billed and received the cash for solar panel recycling, but we'd not fully met the accounting requirements for recognizing the revenue. Company-wide, we reported an overall net loss of $53 million, or $3.21 per share for the full year. There were several non-recurring one-time items reflected in this performance. which include a $12.2 million reclassification of contributions made to GenMAT, which were reclassed from investment to R&D expense. Now, the fact is the research and development we did with GenMAT over the past several years has strengthened our conviction that generative AI will prove a game-changing innovation driver for material science with direct applications to our commercial businesses, including Comstock Fuels and Comstock Metals. We're continuing our R&D efforts with a small internal team, standing on the shoulders of the work we did with Genmat and continuing to expand on the potential for our investments. We're confident that there will be a payoff for these efforts in the future, possibly through contributions to our existing businesses, but also potentially the development of one or more new commercial opportunities. There was an $8.7 million write-down of intangible assets related to previous work we did on a battery recycling system. This system was developed in 2021 and 2022 prior to our pivot to solar panel recycling and silver extraction. We maintain that system as a hedge to our developments. We believe the new system was far superior and last year we proved that with the commercial success of the demonstration facility. When it became clear just how much better our current system operates, it didn't make sense to continue carrying the old technology any longer. There was a $711,000 unrealized loss related to Green Lion. We update our carrying values based on other transactions that Green Lion does, which are beyond our control. We monitor this position very closely, and while we have high expectations for the GreenLion team, this exposure is not core to our plans currently, and we continue actively soliciting buyers for our position. On the positive side, we had an $804,000 gain from the sale of mining assets on the Northern Comstock. When we break it down by segment, Comstock Fuels reported a net loss of $5.3 million, down from a $7.1 million loss in 2023 on reduced R&D expenses. Comstock Metals reported a net loss of $3 million, excluding that adjustment to intangible assets that I mentioned before, which compared to a $1.9 million loss in 2023. This is from increased operating costs at the demonstration facility and development costs for our planned scale-up. Comstock Mining reported net income of $1.6 million, improving on a $500,000 loss in 2023, driven by increased lease revenue and the $804,000 gain from the sale of the northern Comstock. Overall, we ended the year with $1 million in cash after spending $13.9 million for operating activities, a $317,000 increase from the prior year, and $6.5 million for investing activities compared to a $3.6 million proceeds from investments in 2023. Cash from financing activities provided $17.6 million in 2024, primarily from the issuance of common stock and debt instruments convertible into common stock. This is up from $11.3 million raised in 2023. Subsequent to year end on January 10th, 2025, we sold a convertible note receiving $5 million of proceeds on January 13th with an additional 5 million in proceeds coming next week. This transaction stabilizes our cash position for the short term as we continue to advance our plans forward. A few key takeaways to highlight. We've been extremely diligent when it comes to managing our expenses. You can see we've significantly expanded our team and our capabilities this year with only a small $317,000 increase in our operating spend. This is not luck. It requires an organization-wide commitment to doing only the most important things necessary to achieve our goals. We've been talking about subsidiary and project-level financing for a long time. We've told you we believe this will lead to accelerated value recognition. Our recent news on the investment into Comstock Fuels by Marathon Petroleum, the Plan Series A funding round, should give a better, more clear understanding about what we mean. This is the way forward. None of it would be possible without the significant and sustained technical and operational progress our teams have made. We've set an incredible foundation for the next phase of growth. As we look to 2025, we continue to remain focused on the sale of non-core assets. We're actively engaged with markets to that end. Our expectations on the non-mining real estate and water rights portfolio have not changed. We see $50 million of proceeds coming to Comstock, and we believe we'll have a final deal in place this year. And that's separate from our investments in the Silver Springs Opportunity Fund, where we see even more significant upside in the coming years. On Green Lion, we believe our position's worth $20 million. Now you have to consider that Green Lion's a private company, and we're limited on what info we can share. They don't really get a lot of press coverage. But let me say, I don't know of another battery recycler actually producing and selling cathode materials, connecting a fully domestic supply chain. And I think they're extremely well positioned for the current moment. And people are starting to take notice. On fuels, the completion of the A round financing will ensure sufficient runway for fuels to continue to grow and develop highly valuable commercial projects in the U.S. and across the world while reducing the cash demands on Comstock. Comstock will continue to support and invest in Comstock fuels during this process until that funding is complete. Nothing is slowing down. We're continuing to speed up. At Metals, as Krato mentioned, we expect Billings to continue growing to over two and a half million for the full year 2025 from continued operations at the existing facility and our related services. We expect to hit break even by the end of 2026 after the commissioning and operation of the first industry scale facility, which will invest $6 million of CapEx into this year. We've seen robust demand in the market to start the year, which should translate into larger commitments from larger customers through the rest of 2025 in advance of the new facility coming online. And in mining, we intend to invest one to 2 million in 2025 to begin the upgrade and expansion of our existing date and consolidated resource with the intermediate target of defining proven and probable reserves. We believe the ROI on this investment will be significant and ultimately lead to a production ready project. So in addition to using this subsidiary and project level funding, wherever it's available, we're gonna continue to fund Comstock Inc through the sale of equity and debt securities in 2025. The progress and the announcements we've made over recent months have made a meaningful difference in the availability of capital and the improved terms being offered to us. We're currently evaluating multiple options, both with bankers and directly sourced investors, to ensure sufficient capital to meet all these plans this year and ensure our businesses each have a path to profitability. I know some people don't share this point of view with us, But we see equity capital as the most efficient tool to build and grow shareholder value at this stage of a business's life. Additional equity capital buys growth. It makes the pie bigger for everyone. To me, it's a fundamental concept. I'd much rather own 1% of a $700 million plus company versus owning two or 3% of a $70 million company. In reality, there's no scenario where we get to $700 million in fuels or $300 million in metals or over a billion dollars across this whole enterprise without injecting more growth capital this year. When we complete this, and we're going to do it as efficiently as possible, we believe the market will respond accordingly. So in summary, 2024 and the events of the last two months have laid the groundwork to stabilize and significantly improve our financial position in 2025, both at the corporate level and the subsidiary levels, allowing us to establish the necessary runway to build momentum through 2025 and beyond. We're well positioned to raise the capital we need to hit plan this year and move towards significant revenue growth in 2026. And with that, I'm going to hand back to Corrado to talk about what's ahead. Thanks, Billy.