Comstock turns to 'urban mining' to extract value from electronic waste

➤ The energy transition is creating both a need for new metals and a new waste stream that could hold those valuable materials.

➤ Comstock said recycling solar photovoltaics has proved lucrative for the junior gold and silver miner.

➤ "Desperately high investor appetite" for circular mining solutions compared to traditional mining, Comstock Chairman and CEO Corrado De Gasperis said.

Corrado De Gasperis, chairman and CEO of Comstock Inc. Source: Comstock Inc.

Comstock Inc. started out in the precious metals mining sector but is turning its attention to recycling electronic waste and metals from products such as solar panels when they reach the end of their life, what the company calls "urban mining."

As the world transitions to cleaner energy, the company aims to solve two obstacles simultaneously: the rising demand for silver and battery metals and a growing need to deal with waste from electrification products. While the company is still exploring gold and silver at its properties in Nevada, it hopes to roll out two to three large-scale photovoltaic recycling centers in the southwestern US after opening its first commercial recycling facility in northern Nevada.

Corrado De Gasperis, chairman and CEO of Comstock, recently spoke with S&P Global Commodity Insights about adding business lines to its mining focus and the economics of metals recycling.

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and space. A full version of the interview is available for listening on Energy Evolution, a Commodity Insights podcast.

S&P Global Commodity Insights: To start for our listeners, can you tell us about Comstock and your transformation from a junior silver and gold mining company to what you are today?

About 15 years ago, I was invited out to visit the Comstock Lode. It was a small junior mining company, and it was a little distressed and a little unorganized.

What we did was we literally consolidated the entire district where we pulled together hundreds and hundreds of legacy mineral claims, it could be thousands. There are so many claims that we consolidated, which represented not only 12 square miles of contiguous real estate but an incredible 6-mile mineral trend running almost like a river from north to south all the way from the top to the bottom of the district.

Ultimately, the infrastructure for mining turned out to be initially about 1 million ounces of gold and almost 10 million ounces of silver. So it was pretty exciting.

We did actually mine for almost a five-year period with great results, more so in the grades of gold and silver that we were able to discover. There were over 10 ounces, in some cases 20 ounces, of silver for every ounce of gold, but even more important is the environmental stewardship. We were able to repair highways. We were able to reclaim old mines from the legacy late 1800s time frame, old shafts that were very dangerous to the highways and logistics.

Restoring the infrastructure and the highways gave us an incredible foundation, not only the legal license but the social license. That really is what set the table for, I would say, a more ambitious, more courageous set of objectives to become more purposeful in what we were doing.

I went to the board about five years ago and said, "I think we could do more with this remarkable team and this remarkable platform."

Can you tell us a little bit about what you mean by urban mining and what kind of opportunity do we have there?

It's unbelievable how pervasive electrification is becoming, from the tools that you're using in your backyard to the cars that we're driving to the electrical infrastructures that are now being built all around us.

Honestly, if it's solar panels or if it's nuclear facilities or if it's otherwise — they are rich in periodic elements. They are rich in minerals and materials.

There is no preconceived infrastructure, end-of-life solution or even technological know-how to effectively mine those materials out of our urban and suburban communities. They don't exist, literally.

If you find a greenfield, you identify mineral structures, you explore, develop and then extract the minerals from ore from hard rocks. The steps in the process are the same. Everything else is different — where they are, how they are to be extracted, etc. — but you're literally urban mining.

How does it compare on a cost basis? Can you compete with a traditional miner recycling some of those materials?

It will vary, right, from electrification product to electrification product. It's a great question because it makes me think that we started with the idea of recycling lithium-ion batteries because the perception was that there was going to be a tsunami of these batteries coming out of the market soon, right? And there is a tremendous amount of batteries, and it's a desperate need to address those batteries.

But from an [electric vehicle] perspective, they're still a ways off from it being a tsunami. There's remarkable conservation activities going on. They're extending the lives of their batteries. They're also looking to renew the purpose of the batteries.

You've got all these great companies who are focused on lithium-ion batteries. So we said, let's look at photovoltaics because of two reasons. One is they're massively deployed and have reached the end of life on a large scale, which kind of surprised people because people are expecting them to last 25 to 30 years, and we're seeing something closer to on average 15, sometimes as low as 10, sometimes as high as 20, but on average 15.

There was really nobody attending to them, and they were en masse going to landfills. So when California said, "We don't want these solar panels leaching into our ecosystems, into our water systems, we're not going to allow them to go into landfills," we saw an opportunity positioned in Nevada to receive a tsunami of panels.

They're quite expensive to handle in landfills. So, we actually get a tipping fee upfront to receive the panels. We are then able to super efficiently process them. That alone is economically feasible, right?

For photovoltaic solar panels, it's very economically feasible. The breakthrough that we had was that we are now renewing cleanly all the materials, all the aluminum, all the glass and the silver-rich residual fines that are even more economic.

What is your experience in terms of investor appetite for sustainable and circular economy-focused metals, and mining projects?

I've had both experiences, right? Hard rock mining, where you have open pits or underground mining for gold, silver and minerals, is very tough. The volatility in the price has been breathtaking, with gold going from $1,700 when we poured our first ounce to $1,000 when we poured our last ounce, and now, today, it's almost $2,700.

The market certainly likes higher prices, but they don't like high volatility. But on the circular, it's a different story. On the renewables, it's a different story. What we're seeing is almost desperately high investor appetite to find something technologically and economically feasible.

With the US elections coming up in November, are you losing sleep? Does it matter either way for your business?

There's a tremendous amount of government support, especially in the Inflation Reduction Act, for solar. It's resulted in an explosion of solar deployments in the United States. You have exponential growth in new deployments. So this totally addressable market is exponentially growing our projections to 2060 to 2070.

So urban mining is going to be the growth sector. With the grades that we're seeing in silver right now, we could literally become the second- or third-largest silver producer in the state of Nevada.

You're going to have a silver shortfall, and you're going to have a desperate need for demand of silver. Silver is in a growth mode. And just a couple of years ago, demand finally started to exceed the existing annual supply.

Now, the government is also very bullish on supporting low-carbon fuels through renewable fuel standards. And that's pretty concrete and locked in and just got updated and extended.

On the solar panel and the renewable metal side, we don't really have any grants or any support from the government. The business stands alone — and we don't really — I think we're administration-agnostic, frankly.

What role do you see AI playing for your business specifically and broader decarbonization efforts?

Massively disruptive, like massively disruptive, because where our solar panel recycling business is economically feasible on its own, most of the other advanced material solutions — be it silicon chips, be it renewable fuels, be it electrification, or battery chemistries — are heavily dependent on advances in material science. And four years ago, we invested in a physics-based artificial intelligence and people were like, frankly, I'll tell you, even I was like, what's that? It sounds like science fiction.

I think people should be very attentive to physics-based AI, to chemistry-based AI. You're creating a super-intelligent Albert Einstein for all intents and purposes.