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Comstock Inc. Q1 FY2026 Earnings Call

Comstock Inc. (LODE)

Earnings Call FY2026 Q1 Call date: 2026-05-08 Concluded
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Call highlights

Comstock Inc. (NYSE: LODE) reported Q1 2026 with a net loss of approximately $9.4 million, cash of $53.0 million following a $57.5 million oversubscribed equity raise, and is positioning its metals segment for scale by completing its first industry-scale solar panel recycling facility in Silver Springs, Nevada while advancing monetization of legacy mining assets and SSOF real estate.

“We expect the facility to be profitable at 20% utilization and the corporation as a whole at 50% utilization. That is our focus.”

— Speaker 1, CFO

“As of this week, we're fully extinguished with no interest expense projected going forward.”

— Speaker 1, CFO
Bullish
  • Completed oversubscribed equity financing of $57.5 million gross / $53.1 million net, leaving cash and equivalents at $53.0 million at March 31, 2026
  • Substantially all capital expenditures for the first industry-scale metals facility have been completed ($14 million spent including $6.8 million in Q1), with commissioning underway and operations expected to begin in June
  • Recognized $1.4 million cash gain on sale of royalty rights and agreed on preliminary terms to sell all remaining mining assets, with a definitive agreement expected in Q3 2026 and up to $1.5 million in annual cost savings
  • Fully extinguished legacy debt obligations and make-whole provisions, resulting in expected total cash proceeds of nearly $1.8 million returned to the Company and eliminating interest expense going forward
  • Secured power equivalent to 250-300 megawatts via a guaranty agreement with Great Basin Gas Transmission Company, supporting up to $54.0 million of surety by December 31, 2027 for high-value Silver Springs monetization
  • Expect facility to be profitable at 20% utilization and the corporation profitable at 50% utilization, with a shift from project-based to throughput-driven revenue anticipated in 2026
Bearish
  • Net loss for the quarter was approximately $9.4 million, with roughly half from the mining and Bioleum segments and half from metals and the corporation
  • Total operating expenses increased approximately $1.7 million, driven by higher headcount, facility costs, and professional, legal and commercialization-related spend
  • Interest income was the main below-the-line positive; Bioleum has runway only to the end of summer and is not being funded by Comstock, creating reliance on external capital raises
  • The trigger for facility #2 purchases has been pushed back from as early as May/June to no earlier than August or September and could be later

Transcript

Operator

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining Comstock Inc.'s First Quarter 2026 Results and Business Outlook. I'm Zach Spencer, Treasurer and Corporate Secretary. Today is Thursday, May 7, 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 March 31, 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. 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 25 questions in advance of the call. If you have additional questions during the call, please use the Zoom Q&A window, and we will address as many as time allows. Today's discussion will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially due to risks and uncertainties detailed in our SEC filings. Full risk disclosures can be found in our filings on the Investor Relations page and on the SEC website. With that, it is my pleasure to introduce our Chief Financial Officer, Judd Merrill. Judd, you may begin.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Zach, and good afternoon, everyone. I have a few prepared remarks, and then we'll move on through the slide deck here. The first quarter of 2026 reflects the continuation of the transformation we drove in 2025. But more importantly, it marks the beginning of execution at scale. We are now transitioning from a period defined by successful balance sheet recapitalization, institutional banking and capital formation, and expanded and enhanced governance into a period focused on operational development, commercialization and monetization. Here are a few comments on the first quarter. As we discussed in our last investor call earlier this year, we completed an oversubscribed equity financing of $57.5 million in gross proceeds and $53 million net of offering expenses. Our cash balance at the end of the first quarter was just over $53 million, and this is after $14 million that's already been paid between August 2025 and March 31, 2026, and that's for our first facility and funds for our future recovery solutions for producing silver and copper and other metals is estimated at $10 million. And our second facility is estimated at $13 million, and that won't be deployed until our first facility is up and running and scaling and is profitable. Of that first $14 million for the first industry scale facility, which many of you have registered to come and see on May 28 during our AGM, $6.8 million was used in the first quarter and now substantially all the capital expenditures for our first plant have been completed. We also invested $7.75 million in SSOF, and this was at very attractive valuation. And after we committed to natural gas that can power up to 300 megawatts of power to those and to the other Comstock properties in Silver Springs, we are now positioned for a higher value monetization. We also recognized $1.4 million cash gain on the sale of royalty rights associated with the prior sale of our Northern mining claims, reflecting continued progress in monetizing these noncore assets. And separately, we have also now agreed on preliminary terms for selling all of our remaining mining assets, and we're now in the due diligence process with the expectation of announcing a definitive agreement in the third quarter. Should this transaction happen, it would result in significant simplification, meaningful cash, a cleaner and stronger balance sheet, and meaningful upside in annual cost savings. We recognized revenue in the quarter from our pilot plant and deferred revenue from solar panel collections. We expect—and we are now starting to see—both revenue and deferred revenue increase as we move forward this year as we bring the commercial plant online and begin showcasing it to customers in June. Total operating expenses increased approximately $1.7 million, driven primarily by higher headcount supporting metals operations, higher facility costs, including our industry scale site at Silver Springs, increased professional, legal and commercialization-related spend as we expect marketing and sales and metals expenses going forward and also associated with various monetization transactions. From a below-the-line perspective, interest expense declined significantly year-over-year, reflecting the elimination of the legacy debt obligations. As of this week, we're fully extinguished with no interest expense projected going forward. Interest income increased meaningfully, driven by our strong cash position. Derivative-related impacts, while still present, were less significant than in the prior year and should be low to zero going forward with substantially all of our make-whole contingencies now satisfied. Net loss for the quarter was approximately $9.4 million, largely in line with prior year levels, with approximately half of that loss representing the mining and Bioleum segments and the other half representing metals and the corporation. We expect the sale of the mining assets to reduce cash spending by up to $1.5 million annually. We also expect the resulting simplification to further reduce costs. Operationally, what matters most here is the quality and the timeliness of the execution underway. The increases that we have seen in operating expense are intentional. They reflect planned build-out of operational capacity, design and deployment of quality systems and industry scale supporting infrastructure, including operations and sales and logistics. We're also investing in the teams and systems required to support multisite growth. At the same time, the reduction in legacy financing, mining and administrative costs and simplification of our capital structure has begun to show through in our financials. From a liquidity and capital standpoint, we remain in a very strong position. As we previously outlined, we are funded following our recent financings. We have eliminated substantially all of our legacy obligations and associated costs, and we've closed on some smaller sales and agreed to other mining transactions and continued advancing multiple monetization pathways for our noncore assets, which we believe will be significant. So what does this do? It positions us to scale and operate our fully paid for first-of-a-kind industry scale facility, expand metal storage and logistic capacity in multiple states, finalize our first metal recovery designs and pilot a 1 ton per day system preferably at our existing location here in Nevada and then secure, permit and advance our second facility in Las Vegas. Looking forward, the financial model begins to change. As we move into 2026, we expect a shift from project-based revenue to throughput-driven revenue. We expect improving unit economics as feasibility scales. We expect the facility to be profitable at 20% utilization and the corporation as a whole at 50% utilization. That is our focus. At the same time, we remain highly dedicated to monetizing legacy mining and real estate assets and advancing the SSOF-related opportunities and accessing nondilutive capital sources, including grants and industrial financing. In summary, Q1 was successfully about positioning, deployment and readiness, and the rest of 2026 is execution at scale and monetizing our mining and real estate assets. I will now turn it over to Corrado to go deeper into our operational progress and what we are seeing on the ground at metals. Corrado?

Thanks, Judd. Yes. No, it's an outstanding overview. We're positioning—we position ourselves to monetize these assets just as Judd has outlined. We're doing it in the mining. We're doing it in SSOF, and it's all to support the growth of metals. So let's go into metals. I know that we spoke, was it two or three weeks ago with the year-end report. And I have to say that an incredible amount has occurred in the last three weeks. So I've been actually looking forward to this update. With metals, especially, we've now received, deployed, we're assembling and commissioning the facility. Many of you, as Judd said, will be out on the 28th to see it. Quite a few of you have come out over the last two months since January. And every time someone visits, even if it's three or four days in between or a whole week, the plant looks remarkably different. This will be not only the first industry scale, high-speed, high-throughput, zero-landfill solution, but it will be a showcase for everyone, and most importantly, our customers are gaining strong traction. They're strategic, they're regional, they're national. They understand as we engage them what we intend to do, and we will be able to show them as soon as June, and many have already scheduled appointments to visit in June and in July when we will be operating our first industry scale facility in Silver Springs. Our objective, as Judd said, is to turn it profitable, ramping it up to 20% utilization, 50% utilization. And of course, we want to run it full. We're also working on upgrading the downstream production line. You'll see the CapEx that so far has been remarkably in line with our plan, but we've also stepped downstream to enhance recoveries, specifically for glass, and we're already able to do that today. As Judd said, by the end of this year, we'd like to have a 1 ton per day fully integrated metal recovery capability. We're not using the term refining. We're recovering these metals to extremely high purities. We are already recovering glass now to specifications that even two months ago, we didn't know that we could do. The result of that is a number of extremely large-scale companies that want to use our glass for things like fiber optics, for cement additives, a whole spectrum of uses. So we're upgrading the production line. We're going to be enhancing recoveries. We've shifted from worrying about where all this glass is going to find a home. We were working diligently on finding it a home. Initially, the values of those homes were pretty low. Today, they're high, and there's demand for those materials. That's a tremendous update, maybe one of the most salient for this discussion in the last three weeks. We've also identified our second facility. We've already submitted the permits for that facility. We met with our regulators two days ago. It's an extremely positive advance forward. We won't, as Judd said, procure equipment for our second facility until our first one is up and running and scaling up in terms of the throughput that's going through that machine. So we have a nice ability to toggle that amount. You've heard from us more often than not that the silver demand and the market for silver is strong. It's driven by photovoltaics and electronics. The deficit in the industry, which has been developing over the last half decade, is clearly persisting. China seems to have a bigger implication to that persistence. The outlook for silver, which exceeded $80 an ounce yesterday and is hovering right about $80 an ounce today, remains very strong. Insofar as our process, the way to think about our offtake is that aluminum is steady. We've been selling our aluminum cleanly since day one. It's the lowest maintenance part of our offtake stream. The tailings we've been selling to less optimal refiners. The good news updating there is we had previously been shipping our tailings to Asia. We now have secured a boutique domestic offtaker. We're very happy about that because the economics are better and the logistics are much better. But we always still view that as a temporary condition because we are working on our own metal recovery process where we hope this year you'll hear us prove and demonstrate that we can recover silver from these materials. That will be the first objective for 2026: the announcement that we are recovering our own silver at a 1 ton per day pilot scale, and then ultimately that we're recovering copper, pure silicon and silica and then ultimately the recovery of these remaining critical minerals. I couldn't be more excited about the implications of that. That means that we would then be fully integrated, selling all of our materials while still staying in the category of zero waste domestically and overall. The glass was the one that I had mentioned previously and we have an eddy current separator. I'm going to show you the equipment associated with that. Let me talk about the capital because we've been remarkably on plan here. I think generally speaking, when we were talking in aggregates, we would talk about $12 million to $15 million as the ultimate capital. Judd mentioned $13 million. That's our real number for facility #2. We spent $11 million on the facility. I'm going to show you some pictures of it coming together here in just a minute. That is for all of the equipment to load a panel, crush a panel, condition a panel, sort a panel, bag it—the entire process from soup to nuts that allows us those three streams. We ultimately spent another $1.1 million in power generating systems—there's a pervasive understanding that the grids are weak and short. We didn't plan on being supported by the grid, and we have our own strong natural gas feed right into our facility. Quite frankly, the capital for these power generating systems was a bit higher than the upgrades that were originally planned for off-grid operation, but the cost of the power is actually lower. So we're very happy about that. There was $2 million that's been spent. These are monies spent that you're looking at. There's $2 million that was spent on leasehold improvements. Comstock Metals spent that money. The landlord is responsible for that money. That money will come back from the landlord. We had a need for speed. And so we got all that done. The building looks incredible. That includes not just building and leasehold improvements to 600 Lake Avenue, but the entirety of the storage complex, which is the number just below it, $1.1 million, and you see the pictures to the side of the fencing and the storage, which is all coming online by the end of this month; many of you again will see all of that. So if you take out the leasehold improvements, we're just at about $13 million, remarkably right on plan. The metals team has been exceptional in managing their capital budget and their capital spending. We are going to spend another $1.5 million; about half of that has already been spent for this product upgrade. What's happened—and I'll show you a picture of it right now—is we have been engaged with some of the largest glass manufacturers in the country. We were previously talking about using this glass for recycling bottles and tiles. Now we're talking about fiber optics and cements. We're presenting our glass, which is clean of laminates, plastics, glues and those kinds of contaminants, but still has some dust on it and some small shards of aluminum. So we assembled this eddy current separator system that magnetically removes metals and then cleans the glass so that our glass meets the highest specifications of the best glass manufacturers in the country, and we're in final stages of negotiation with multiple parties. All of the parties want our glass. We find ourselves from a supply and demand position in a very good place. In terms of the actual facility, this is an older picture that you've seen before with the facility filled with solar panels. That's not true anymore. The facility and the leasehold improvements have substantially all been completed. The equipment is being assembled. We took pictures as we were progressing through it just so you can get a sense of how it's laying out and how it's coming together. By the end of this month, it will be fully assembled including the power generation and the external scrubbing systems. Everything is on site and being assembled and the storage facility is fully fenced and really laid out extremely nicely now. The road improvements are being made just alongside it so that we can transport the material efficiently from storage into the processing facility. A tremendous amount has been done with the core facility and the three upstream streams. A tremendous amount has been done upgrading some of our offtake, especially the glass. We've also made a tremendous amount of progress on our metal recovery from these materials. We have designed this process. We have finalized the design. We have engaged our major partners and are pilot testing; bench testing is being done in a distributed fashion. As Judd said, we expect it all to come together into an integrated 1 ton per day solution that we would prefer to have at the 600 Lake facility. That was what our meeting earlier this week with our regulators was about, and I couldn't have been happier with the outcome of those discussions. I want to show you the market as well. We're making continued progress with the market and with strategic customers. We're engaged in strategic customer agreements, master service agreements and in some cases co-locating and potentially joint operating agreements. Those are fascinating. This picture that everyone has seen before shows how clearly California, Arizona and Nevada represent the oldest panels and the largest end-of-life market in the country. The next map was updated; the map you're about to see is two years old for context. California, Nevada, Arizona remain the same, but you start to see what's happening in the rest of the country. In the last two years, the expanded deployments across the southern United States up the Eastern Seaboard and into the Mid-Atlantic and Northern Midwest have been remarkable. Part of this is improvement of data, but you can see that this is not a regional play. The market is big. People always ask about new deployments and whether the solar industry has hit headwinds. My first reaction is we care less about what's being deployed today because we're end-of-life. Our market is the end-of-life. But look at the projects under development; it doesn't seem like the solar industry has hit a wall. It has some headwinds politically and otherwise, but it's incorrect to imagine there isn't wide-scale deployment happening. We're stable with our projections. We feel very good about what this facility looks like running at 90% utilization. We feel good about the ability to capture high yields of our silver once the first step in our recovery process is to start recovering our own silver at over 90%. With higher silver prices, our metal recoveries can look as good as, if not better than, tipping fees. This is the thesis. This does not include higher recoveries of our own metals. This only includes the sale of glass, aluminum and the tailings. I want to pivot to Silver Springs for a couple of updates. Even more has happened there than with the metals business. Judd is fully dedicated to the monetization and sale of all of our mining assets. We're in diligence and close mode. That's very big news. We cannot share details until the definitive agreements are done, signed and delivered. As Judd said, we expect that with high probability in the third quarter. The Silver Springs opportunity: we are deploying capital there and allocated specific capital. Our Board has approved a path to controlling this enterprise. The reason we want to control it is because we were successful in securing power for this land. I can't think of a stronger market to monetize into. Demand for powered land is generational. With power comes high value. We're sitting in immediate proximity to major development—what used to be 10 to 15 minutes up the road is now across the street. When we committed to up to 300 megawatts of power, we put ourselves in a position with potentially 800 to 900 acres of land to monetize alongside major enterprises. We do not want to become a land developer or a data center operator. We want to monetize these properties at the highest value. Three years ago, anyone could apply to a local utility and get power; that's not true today. If the land isn't powered, there's very little interest. If the land is powered, companies are fighting for it. We have work to do to perfect and secure the land. By perfecting and securing the land, we mean control of the entity—greater than 50%—and clear titles, water rights and secured power, debt-free and obligation-free, which we can then market to a major counterparty. Companies are making very large investments in the region, and you only have to come and visit to see the major developments underway nearby. Powered land drives valuation; these enterprises talk about land per megawatt more than land per acre. The valuations are getting very interesting for us. In closing, the metals business will be commissioned. By the end of this month, you'll see a fully connected, fully assembled plant. By June, it will be operating. By July, it will be operating continuously. We're on track to be operating in Q2 and ramping up a few months later than originally hoped, but on track nonetheless. It is a showcase. We're proud to show you how it operates and the customers that are offtaking our materials. We will not trigger the purchase of equipment for facility #2 until we are satisfied with everything we see on Serial #1 and with the flow of panels. That doesn't mean we haven't secured site two or started permitting, but we won't pull the trigger on capital until the market suggests it's the right thing to do. We very strongly expect to announce the mining transaction in the third quarter, get that wrapped up and completed. As Judd said, we're going to get cash, retain upside, reduce cost and simplify the company. We expect news in the third quarter on Silver Springs transactionally—it's not synonymous with it being sold that quickly, but we believe it will be positioned and engaged with meaningful counterparties. From there, in about 100 to 120 days, we should have a lot of clarity on the monetization strategy. The options are bigger, broader and more probable. For anyone that's been out since January, including our new directors, there's a strong level of excitement about what's happening. Our end game is to monetize mining assets, monetize Silver Springs in the most intelligent way and enable our treasury to fund what is turning out to be more than just a solar panel recycling business but an industrial materials company. Let me pause there and we can go to questions.

Operator

Thank you, Corrado. As I mentioned at the beginning of the call, we received more than 25 questions prior to the call. I can see that we have quite a number of additional questions coming through Zoom. Corrado and Judd, our first question is: what are your future plans for your mineral and mining properties?

So I think as we said there, we're selling them. We were careful with our words previously. We used to say monetize and we thought there could be joint ventures and earn-ins. Those are behind us. We have a clear path to full sale. Full sale will mean we get cash, and as Judd said, meaningful. We may get some upside with equity. We most certainly will get upside with royalties. So we feel really good about what that value looks like to us. We also feel even better about redeploying that capital into our solar recycling business.

Operator

Thank you, Corrado. The next question is on Comstock Metals. Your competitors have publicly announced more than 15 grams per panel of silver. Can LODE confirm how much silver they are currently extracting per panel, not the theoretical maximum?

Yes. Our competitors say a lot of things. It's reasonable to say 16, 17, 18 grams per panel. We're literally consistently seeing that for the majority of panels. Thin-film panels have much less silver. We're also getting, in some cases, wafers of rejected manufacturing material that have silver and silicon. It varies. For the substantial majority, we're talking about roughly 0.5 ounce per panel—16, 17, 18 grams per panel—it's pretty steady. Our objective is to recover a very high percentage of that number—over 90%. Today, we're generating tailings and silicon and silica with a lot of silver in them, and we're sending those to a refinery. In the future, we want to be recovering those metals ourselves. We don't want to be getting paid for 45% or 50% of the silver; we want to recover and get paid for 90-plus percent. When there's dust escaping or residual on the glass, there's silver in that dust. The upgrading of the glass results in capturing and recovering more dust, which means more silver. We expect to start at a reasonably high recovery and then continuously improve the recovery of those minerals. We'll be able to estimate the percentage that we're capturing once we start operating the machine, and we'll continue to pursue the theoretical maximum as a target. Understanding this is a first-of-a-kind operation, we don't yet know the definitive answer, but that's the pursuit.

Operator

Thank you, Corrado. How much of the company's anticipated solar panel feedstock supply is already secured through long-term customer agreements? And what level of visibility does management have into future volumes?

We spent a lot of time talking about this even when our new directors visited a few weeks ago. It is the number-one least certain item. That said, we're signing master service agreements with large customers. We're working with companies that are serious about how they manage environmental liabilities, and they show seriousness by paying a tipping fee and wanting certificate destruction quickly. Bringing the system online will move major amounts of material. To be clear on the low threshold Judd mentioned: operating at 20% capacity equates to moving roughly 2,000 tons of material per month. We have upwards of 6,000-plus tons of material sitting there, ready to be processed once the machine gets up and running. We feel comfortable that the business and the customers we have would sustain that level. That level is a minimum threshold. We need to continue to work to bring panels in and grow utilization. So in the initial three months, a couple thousand panels a month are available to be processed. We would probably run at that lower rate while we debug, optimize and tweak the process, and then let the market help us grow from there. How much visibility do we have? We have three to five months' worth of visibility today. Once the machine comes online and panels start flowing, visibility will increase.

Operator

Corrado, how confident are you that the new equipment will run without any problems?

We feel good about the equipment. Specifically, each stage of our production—from the main crushing systems to the conditioning ovens to the secondary shredding and separating systems—uses the same engineers, the same manufacturers and the same suppliers that we used and operated in the demonstration facility for over two years. We're coming on to 2.25 years of that work. Even better is the scale: we're over 20x scale from the demo to where we are today, a scale that our lead engineer has operated at in past companies. So even though this is the first time this scale is being applied to solar panels, it's not the first time the scale has been applied to other materials. There will always be bugs and hiccups, but we don't expect any fatal flaws. We expect bumps, but nothing that will derail our commercial process.

Operator

Thank you. Are you able to provide fiscal year guidance on revenue?

We have not provided specific guidance. There are some people out there talking, but I want to stick with: we'll be processing a couple thousand tons a month to start once we get two or three months under our belt, and once we've had further customer channel checks and customer visits. A lot of customers want to see the machine operating. We'll have much better guidance after that initial operating period.

Operator

Okay. Moving on to SSOF. Regarding the Silver Springs properties, how do we best think about valuation of these assets?

We've been talking internally about prices per square foot of land. The numbers that justify our actions are single-digit prices per square foot of land. We see the market for powered land in our immediate locality trading in double digits. That's a remarkable gap. What we're hearing from the market is that if you're a private company with small megawatts—5, 10, 15, 20 megawatts—people are valuing what you're delivering in roughly $0.5 million to $0.75 million per megawatt. If you're at bigger scale—100, 200, 300 megawatts, or up to 900 megawatts to a gigawatt—you're talking $1 million to $4 million per megawatt. Those numbers are staggering. If that's real, Silver Springs could be worth more than our current market cap, which is why we feel we need to monetize it. We have subject matter experts coming in to validate our position and give second and third opinions, and the feedback is very positive. It's very complex, detailed work and requires diligent counterparties, but things are moving. Our directors and Judd have supported these efforts, and partners are aligning. We're moving strongly.

Operator

With land sales, where will the capital be used?

Our singular objective is to fund the growth—ideally exponential growth—of our metals business. This will be a national, evolving to international, industrial materials company. The entire supply chain is being constructed. One thing we haven't spoken much about is the logistics network the metals team is building. Our plant managers are out in California and Ohio coordinating logistics, customers and suppliers. For glass in particular, some of the largest glass manufacturers in the country have plants within 30 minutes of our location, which matters because glass doesn't travel far when you're getting paid modest per-ton rates. So the number-one destination for proceeds from land sales is metals growth. Except for the money we're spending to perfect Silver Springs and secure power to achieve high values, it's all metals. Monetize mining and redeploy to metals; monetize Silver Springs and redeploy to metals. We're not funding Bioleum today. They have runway to the end of this summer as they're raising capital. We're paying close attention to that and feel good about their ability to raise capital, but our immediate focus is metals and Silver Springs monetization.

Operator

Yes, it is. Thank you, Corrado. Can you provide an update on Bioleum and what you expect from the investment going forward?

Two salient points about Bioleum. Number one is the bottleneck in the renewable fuel industry is feedstock. There's only so much soybean and vegetable oil and used cooking oil; that's constrained supply. The U.S. government owns capacity for 16 billion gallons in renewable diesel and fuel but only about 4 billion is being produced because there's not enough fat oils and greases. Bioleum takes abundant woody biomass and converts it into high-yield, low-cost, low carbon-intensity oils for feedstock, sourced with a dedicated crop from Hexas Biomass. That gives them a low-cost, reliable feedstock source. That's a strong pitch to the capital markets. Hexas only came online in December, and it's taken a few months to integrate. Now they have a differentiated and strong solution. The other point is they need the right investors to take them through a Series B and then a potential IPO. When they reach Series B and then go public, they'll be a liquid investment that we can monetize more flexibly. Acquisition is also possible. Their route is Series A, Series B, IPO, and I think they have a good path to do that. The less dependency they need from us to do that, the happier we are because our treasury will focus on the metals supply chain.

Operator

Thank you for that, Corrado. Can you highlight capital spending for 2026?

Yes. Judd mentioned the $14 million spent for the first facility—that's done. Everything is in place. We're waiting for the last few oven deliveries. These ovens are massive and arrive last, so we're synchronizing deliveries. By the end of May, we expect everything to be assembled; that money is spent. We're going to spend another $1.5 million for upgrading the downstream glass system; some of that has already been spent and the remainder has been ordered because our large glass customers require continuous supply. We will spend $10 million towards a 1 ton per day fully integrated metal recovery system (formerly called refining) that will start producing silver, copper, aluminum, silicon metal and potentially other critical minerals. I don't want to dismiss the silica and silicon metal—if you have a 1 ton per day unit and you can extract even a small fraction in metal weight, you're still handling almost 2,000 pounds of material a day, much of which is glass, silica and silicon metal. If we get those to specification, we're selling 100% of everything. That's the thesis and marketing strategy. Of that $10 million, some is equipment, but much will manifest as R&D expense because proving 1 ton per day will require lab work and testing; once proven, components will go into labs and then we'll scale to 25 tons per day and eventually 250 tons per day for an industry-scale metal recovery facility in the U.S. To reiterate, $1.5 million for downstream upgrades, $10 million for a 1 ton per day recovery system, and we will not pull the trigger on facility #2 purchases until we're satisfied with facility #1 ramp-up. Originally we thought that could be early like May or June, but now we feel the earliest will be August or September and it could be later. We're not in a hurry; we're in a hurry to ramp up facility #1 and make it profitable.

Operator

Thank you, Corrado. We're coming up on time, and I think we've covered all of the important questions. If we did not get to your question, please send it to [email protected], and we'll do our best to respond either directly or we'll post the response on X. For anyone who is not following us on X, our main account is at Comstock Inc. Please follow us. Corrado, before we wrap up, please give us some final thoughts for the remainder of Q2 as well as overall 2026 objectives.

Yes. We're in a great situation where in 21 days we'll be speaking again at our Annual General Meeting. We already have 50-plus people registered. We'll take a tour of the facility and show the showcase. If you haven't registered, the deadline is about three days away, so please register. If you've received your proxies, please vote. We're locked and loaded: our Board, our management team and our balance sheet are ready. It's all about execution. In 21 days we'll speak again about more execution and show visuals of the plant coming online. From there, it's about panel flow—the panels coming in and the product sales going out like a normal real company. We're looking forward to seeing everybody on May 28 as well.

Operator

Definitely. Thank you, Corrado. That concludes Comstock's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call and Business Update. Thank you for joining us.

Thanks, everyone. Speak soon.

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