Corrado De Gasperis, CEO of Comstock Inc., is leveraging the company’s rich history of mining innovation to create a more sustainable future. De Gasperis joins Dr. Denis Phares, host of the Li-MITLESS ENERGY Podcast, to discuss Comstock’s ground-breaking technology to develop alternative fuel sources and sustainable mining practices, its multifaceted approach to energy innovation, and its commitment to driving systemic decarbonization in the modern era.
Comstock is Paving the Way to a Sustainable Future with Net Neutral Fuels
Dating back to the 1800s, Comstock Inc.’s rich legacy as a global leader in mining innovation allowed early pioneers to create revolutionary techniques still being used today. Drawing from its storied past, Comstock continues leading the way to a cleaner and greener future for the mining industry. In addition to propelling the mining industry, Comstock is dedicated to working towards systemic decarbonization. While leveraging its existing infrastructure and advanced technology, Comstock is implementing more natural resources while working towards reducing overall carbon output.
In this episode of the Li-MITLESS ENERGY Podcast, Corrado De Gasperis, CEO of Comstock Inc., joins host Dr. Denis Phares to discuss the future of renewable energy and a net-neutral fueled economy. DeGasperis sheds light on Comstock’s endeavors, which extend beyond its mining heritage into diversified ventures, including exploring, developing, and utilizing new technologies. Additionally, DeGasperis shares Comstock’s expertise in extraction processes with high-temperature and high-pressure methods for extracting materials efficiently, which can be used to make lithium extraction cleaner, more efficient, and economically viable. Overall, Comstock is progressing toward commercializing its innovative fuel production technology and collaborations with key stakeholders to advance sustainable solutions.
Listen to the full episode or watch the recording on our YouTube channel, and be sure to keep up with the exciting new developments at Comstock on LinkedIn and Twitter!
Podcast Transcript
Denis Phares 0:15
Welcome to The Li-MITLESS ENERGY Podcast. We are back home in Reno, Nevada. So, I am taking this opportunity to find another local CEO. So, I’d like to welcome the chairman and CEO of Comstock Inc., Mr. Corrado De Gasperis.
Corrado De Gasperis 0:31
Thank you, Denis. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Denis Phares 0:33
Thank you so much for coming on the program. We actually have a lot to talk about because you guys do so much at Comstock. But I want to start off by talking about Comstock because this is the actual historical mining company from the 1800s. Correct?
Corrado De Gasperis 0:49
That is correct. We consolidated about 12 square miles of mineral properties. It represents, substantially, all of the historic Comstock Lode. We don’t own Virginia City, just to be clear, but pretty much everything just to the south of it, and for six miles of contiguous mineral trend, gold, and silver trend. And we entitled all the properties, we built out the infrastructure, and we were in production for five years. Currently, we’re exploring, and developing, and using new technologies to expand the gold and silver resources, but it’s only one of our four lines of business.
Denis Phares 1:24
So, the mine there is focused on gold and silver?
Corrado De Gasperis 1:27
Gold and silver, it was the largest silver discovery in the country at the time. It’s why Nevada is nicknamed The Silver State.
Denis Phares 1:33
Which, at the time, was like 1850?
Corrado De Gasperis 1:37
1859 to about 1880 was the height of the lode. But there’s been mining on the district pretty much every decade except for when the War Act shut it down in 1945.
Denis Phares 1:47
So, what a quintessentially Nevada company you are, and similar to Nevada have become very tech-savvy and diversified. So, let’s talk about the diversification in recent years.
Corrado De Gasperis 2:03
Yeah. So first, I would just correlate that also back, it is very Nevada, home is Nevada for us. We’re headquartered here, all of our companies are established and domiciled. But Comstock was also like a global leader in innovating new technologies and enabling mining.
Denis Phares 2:19
Really?
Corrado De Gasperis 2:20
Yeah. Underground mining concepts were established by Deidesheimer, he created this block set modeling that allowed them to mine 700 miles of underground tunnels with picks, and shovels, and jackhammers. So that was invented on the Comstock. People would be shocked to hear that Professor Jackson from the University of Nevada, Reno, perfected cyanide leaching and created the entire open pit mining industry right from the Comstock Lode at the dawn of Windmill in Silver City. So, there’s and there’s dozens and dozens of innovations that went global in the mining industry from the Comstock Lode. So we actually feel not only is Nevada currently diversifying with high tech and cleantech, but it’s also, fundamentally, foundationally part of our legacy.
Denis Phares 3:14
That is interesting. So, these techniques that were developed, are they still in use?
Corrado De Gasperis 3:19
Yeah. So, the cyanide process is the world standard for leaching oxide ores today, Merrill Crowe presses were being used, and that’s one of the standards in the industry today for precipitation and processing of the metals. And there’s dozens more. So, certainly, some have been superseded, but I would not call the mining industry a pioneer in new tech. So, a lot of them are still in place.
Denis Phares 3:49
Well, the relation to the coming lithium boom, there’s quite a bit of new tech pioneering associated with lithium mining, correct?
Corrado De Gasperis 4:01
Absolutely. Not only the discoveries there too, the processing techniques thereof, and right now, we’re working on a breakthrough on extraction. So. all of these things will make it cleaner, more efficient, more economically feasible.
Denis Phares 4:19
So, can we talk about extraction a little bit? How is this different than… You said, in innovation and extraction, how is this different than, basically, getting it out of the ground and purifying it into lithium carbonate, is there something different?
Corrado De Gasperis 4:33
Yeah. Well, so there’s complexity in the lithium industry because there’s different forms of lithium. You can be literally trying to process from hard rock or you could be extracting from the brine in the fluids. So, maybe the right segue to that question is when we think of a core competency in Comstock, be it fuels recycling, and ore mining is extraction processes. So, we have expertise in high temperature, high pressure. Call it supercritical processes for extraction of these materials or elements from the materials that we are able to extrapolate. So our core competency in taking woody biomass biofuels is the supercritical digestion process, how we get the carbon, how we get the materials out of the wood efficiently, effectively, and we’re applying those similar techniques to other extractions of lithium carbonate from black mass of lithium from these species or the originating ore body.
Denis Phares 5:39
You kind of jumped ahead there to extraction of fuels from wood, which I did want to talk to you about that. But I wanted to get there by going through the issue that came up recently in a panel that both of us were on. And you made a relatively controversial comment when the idea of having a large fraction of the American fleet being electric vehicles by 2030, and what did you say exactly?
Corrado De Gasperis 6:14
It’s not possible.
(Laughter)
Denis Phares 6:17
It was more prolific than that.
Corrado De Gasperis 6:19
I might have said, “Impossible.”
Denis Phares 6:22
You said, “It’s absolutely not possible.” So this is coming from somebody who’s actually getting lithium from the ground.
Corrado De Gasperis 6:28
Yeah. So, I guess my view on this is we absolutely believe there’s a global dilemma. We don’t spend one minute of time in our company debating the climate issue. The science is clear to us, the more carbon that is being emitted into the atmosphere, the more it impacts the climate with meaningful negative implications. So, the mission of our company now is to enable systemic decarbonization. And so, everything that we do, everything we think about is to that purpose. So, we call ourselves a purpose-driven company to enable systemic decarbonization. And so, when we think about electrification, we absolutely see EVs, electric vehicles, as part of the solution. Not a mature part of the solution, an incredibly immature part of the solution with two implications on that, that are salient. One is the current supply chain isn’t decarbonizing, it is not a net reducer of carbon. We can all agree that driving a car that has no emission coming out of the tailpipe is an appeasing idea. It makes us feel like we’re not adding carbon.
Denis Phares 7:54
But it’s good for urban air pollution, anyway.
Corrado De Gasperis 7:56
It certainly is implicating to urban concentrations. Where it’s too concentrated or overwhelming, it’s an incredible solution. And it also eliminates some of the range issues that we currently have at this level of maturity. And so, that’s the way we should be thinking about it. Urban concentrations, higher smog, or emitting areas, it’s a relief. However, if you’re charging the car with fossil fuel-based energy, if the supply chain to manufacture the car, if the supply chain to rip the cobalt, rip the nickel, inefficiently extract the lithium from the ground is a net contributor of the carbon problem, it doesn’t solve the global problem. You can have some regional relief to a goal that will never be achieved. There’s where my context is. It’s impossible. Now, because it’s appeasing, because there’s no emissions coming out of the tailpipe, our leaders jump to ‘everything must be electrified.’ If we electrified everything today, it would be a net polluter; first problem. Second problem; there’s no where near the materials required to achieve that goal. Nowhere near not in any timeframe that’s relevant. Forget 2050. So, we think that electrification, as it matures, as renewable energy is used, as it’s deployed in regions and segments where it has a maximum human impact, it’s a part of the solution. Even in that context, it’s a minority of the solution. Most people are surprised when I say that Los Angeles County has more population than 39 of the 50 states. So, we don’t have the density issues in Wyoming. We don’t have the density issues, frankly, in most of Nevada, except for Vegas, and maybe a little bit of Reno. So, it’s a part of the solution. It contributes to the solution if it matures, and it evolves. Elon Musk says it too that we need to have more renewable energy in the supply chain, we need to do things to improve it. So, even a Tesla is only part of the solution.
Denis Phares 10:31
Well, one of the other problems, of course, if a lot of the transportation fleet is electrified is, as you noted, all of that energy is going to come from the grid, it’s going to come from…
Corrado De Gasperis 10:44
All of it. Substantially, all of it.
Denis Phares 10:46
So that puts extra stressors on the grid that are already starting to become evident.
Corrado De Gasperis 10:54
Not only stressing a cracking grid, but it does not achieve the objective. If you’re trying to systemically decarbonize, you are not decarbonizing any part of the system.
Denis Phares 11:06
It does achieve the objectives if the majority of the grid becomes renewable.
Corrado De Gasperis 11:11
That’s what I’m saying, maturity is critical. Evolution of the solution is crtical.
Denis Phares 11:15
So thank you. We appreciate that plug at Dragonfly because that’s kind of what we’ve been touting is, at least, some of that lithium that comes out of the ground has to contribute to the storage issue that we have on the grid so that we can have more solar and wind. But I want to come back to the issue of transportation, and so much lithium battery research has been focused on replacing the way that gasoline engines behave. And, by that, I mean you want to be able to drive a very long way on a charge like a tank of gasoline, but also, you want to be able to charge it very, very quickly. And of course, we maintain that those are completely different metrics than what’s required for storage on the grid. But what I like about what you’re proposing at Comstock is the alternative of, well, let’s not necessarily replace the internal combustion engine, let’s make the fuel net neutral. So, let’s talk about that. How do you go about making fuel from the carbon dioxide that we put in the air?
Corrado De Gasperis 12:25
Yeah, absolutely. That’s really where we believe Comstock will have the most substantial impact so far in terms of our technologies that were commercializing in systemic decarbonization. Let me tell you why that is. When you look at mobility, when you look at all of the transportation burn, if you want to think of it that way, the fuels that we’re burning, it makes up a substantial majority of the emissions that we’re trying to reduce. The United States alone makes up 25% of that number. And road burn, like highway and road transportation, is 75% of that number. So, you’re talking about, if decarbonizing is your mission, we’re going after one of the big kahunas, we’re going after the major number, which is transportation. Globally, we have 1.5 billion vehicles deployed. And if you get to 10% electrification, which is pretty massive, that’s only 150 million vehicles. So, you still have like 1.35 billion vehicles and infrastructure all around, all set in place to burn these liquid fuels. So, when you think about what’s the cost of replacement, it’s unachievable. Trillions is not the right discussion, it’s just not a feasible concept to replace an existing infrastructure that’s pervasive in its utility and in its scope. So, the solution is to replace the offending emitter, the fossil fuel with a carbon-neutral solution.
Denis Phares 14:30
So, because of that, it has been considered kind of a holy grail to be able to produce liquid fuels from vegetation that obviously get its carbon from the air. So, why is Comstock on the forefront? What’s the advance there that’s been lacking globally for so long?
Corrado De Gasperis 14:54
So, the reason for it is that our Chief Scientist, our Chief Executive for our fuels business, the two of them, and others, have spent nearly two decades working on extraction technologies. Their first breakthrough, actually, was being able to extract corn oil from the biomass, the waste biomass from the corn ethanol process. So, they invented a process for extracting corn oil from waste biomass that now has been adopted by 95% of the corn ethanol industry. And, certainly, in the low points of their cycles was the only reason that industry was still profitable.
Denis Phares 15:45
So, what do you mean by waste biomass? Is it the corn after the ethanol has been extracted?
Corrado De Gasperis 15:49
After they’ve extracted the ethanol, the remaining…
Denis Phares 15:53
So, what’s left is cellulose.
Corrado De Gasperis 15:53
Yes, the remaining agricultural cellulose, biomass, its waste. And they extracted a multibillion-dollar revenue stream from waste that the industry was paying to throw away, so they’ve done that. Now they advanced that technology into extracting ethanol similarly. they were in that industry, they were in that space extracting ethanol from the cellulose in wood. They patented the process, they perfected the process, and we took an interest. The reason we took an interest is we were saying, “What are the major problems in the market, and could we find a solution to address those?” Talking about decarbonization. So, we said, “This is a solution that works. What could we do? We could take wood, waste wood, sawdust, mill scraps…” The federal government puts out a report called The Billion-Ton Report, and it shows that there’s 100 million tons a year generated, just in the United States, just from these mills, in sawdust and waste wood from the lumber industry. 100 million tons.
Denis Phares 17:11
And is that just landfilled now?
Corrado De Gasperis 17:13
It’s either landfilled, left in dumps alongside the mills, or sometimes, there’s very low productive uses, like bedding for animals, things like that. So, they were able to extract this cellulosic sugar from the cellulose. And then, ferment and catalyst that material into molecular identical ethanol. So cellulose…
Denis Phares 17:39
When did that happen?
Corrado De Gasperis 17:40
So, I think our team was able to do that eight, nine years ago, 10 years ago.
Denis Phares 17:45
And that was at Comstock or before?
Corrado De Gasperis 17:47
No, before. We acquired the company in 2021, two years ago, two and a half years ago now. So, what we were interested in, what we were taken by is that this unutilized waste wood that was abundant could be available to start producing decarbonizing fuels. So we were attracted by that, it was technically proven TRL level, six, seven, we were ready to go. And it was economically feasible. And the economics were; make ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, which is molecular identical to corn ethanol, and then take the byproduct. Remember, again, now we’ve got only half of the wood is cellulose. So, you take a ton of wood, you’re only effectively using half a ton. The other half is lignin-rich, hard nut to crack, and you use it in a boiler to just generate energy, you burn it for energy. And why is that positive, that’s positive because the carbon impact score is better if you do that than if you’re using, for example, natural gas to fuel or petroleum, a fossil fuel generator. So, we liked that a lot. And they were able to produce 70 gallons of ethanol from half of the wood. Now, ethanol, understand, is blended, it’s a blend, it’s not a drop-in fuel. So, even though ethanol has a positive carbon impact, it’s only 10% of the real impact because you’re going to blend 10% of the ethanol with normal petroleum gas. So, there’s a very big mitigating effect on ethanol. So, what was promising to us is that they were looking in expanding to maybe convert ethanol to a drop-in fuel, like sustainable aviation fuel, or diesel, or even gasoline but that wasn’t perfected yet. We were looking at that on that side of the equation. What’s happened since then is a monstrous breakthrough for us because, when you look at this ton of wood, and you say, “Well…” Cellulose is what’s called hydrophilic. It loves water. It absorbs water. You can imagine your Scott Paper Towel is made from cellulose, and it’s a water absorber. Lignin is hydrophobic, which means it hates water. It’s afraid of water. It’s, literally, oil and water. So, the industry, for me, with hindsight, it seems difficult to explain why the industry struggled and struggled many, many frustrated attempts on trying to utilize the entirety of the wood. But with hindsight, what we see is that they were treating that ton of wood the same. They were trying to treat it, come up with treatments, if you will, that were the same for that ton of wood. Our president, David Winsness, saw a solution in plain sight, which was fractionalize the wood, treat this half extraction one way, treat this half extraction the other way. And then, we had a breakthrough where we were able to, essentially, liquefy the lignin. And we call it melt soluble. And we use a solvent that liquefies the lignin and creates a material that is nearly the carbon-neutral equivalent to petroleum. So, we branded it Byoleum. But now, what’s happened is instead of getting a 50% effective yield from the ton of wood, we can get 100% effective yield. Let me use real numbers, the technology we’re deploying now, instead of getting, example, 70 gallons of ethanol, from that half a ton, which we think of as seven gallons of impact because it has to be blended, we can now get 50 gallons of drop-in fuel from the cellulose stream. 50 gallons. And 45 to 50 gallons from the lignin stream. So now, we’re talking about delivering 95 to 100 gallons of drop-in fuel; gasoline, diesel, sustainable aviation, from one ton of wood. Because it was economic in just the ethanol portion with using the other half as a fuel source to burn power, we now have a breakthrough that is powerfully economic. But it’s not just the economics, the problem in the industry is that there’s about just under 20 renewable refineries in the United States today, big companies like Marathon Petroleum, these companies are all working on renewable solutions. They all have their own carbon targets. They’re serious. We see Big Oil is serious. We see everyone, from Exxon, to Chevron, to Marathon. All these companies are publicly saying they have carbon targets and they’re working with renewable fuels. And we know they are. There’s less than 20 up and running in the United States, and they use today, as feedstock, two and a half billion gallons of vegetable oils. We call them fats, oils, and greases, fogs per annum to produce these renewable fuels. There’s barely enough of these oils to service these facilities. Now, shockingly, there’s 40 under construction today, as we speak, that will require another 5 to 7 billion gallons of vegetable oils. Now, to your point, not only are you competing with agricultural uses, you’re competing with the food chain. So, you don’t have a positive situation brewing here, you have a bottleneck in the renewable fuel industry that does not have a solution to it. And so, we are the solution to that constraint. We have an abundance of feedstock, which I’d like to talk to you about a little bit more, why is this decarbonizing? How does this work? We have an abundance of feedstock. 100 million tons. 100 million tons, for us, would create… You’re talking about there’s 150 billion gallons burned in the United States every year. So, that’s the market, 150 billion gallons.1 million tons, we can produce 100 million gallons. 1 million tons a year facility can produce 100 million gallons. So, you can see, with just waste wood, over the next 5, 6, 7 years, we make a big dent in the market. But there’s over a billion tonnes of waste wood generated a year. The 100 million is what the government and the Renewable Fuel Standard says qualifies for their incentives, but there’s almost another billion tons, meaning, we can solve the problem. with this feedstock, we can fully supply with this feedstock. And then, you start to scratch your head and say, “Canada has twice as much wood as the United States,” and it becomes exciting. It becomes exciting.
Denis Phares 25:30
Well, there you have it. I guess we got the problem solved.
Corrado De Gasperis 25:34
Well, we have the solution to now solve the problem. We must build those supply chains. We must secure those wood sources. We must build the bio intermediate facilities. What we would love to do is produce the cellulosic sugar and the Byoleum, and then feed these renewable refineries the feedstock that allows them to produce hydrotree and produce the drop-in fuels. We could do both, but our view is to be more systemic, to more integrate into the existing infrastructure and really focus on the part of the system that’s broken, that is constrained, that is blocked. But can we talk about the wood a little bit more?
Denis Phares 26:19
Go for it.
Corrado De Gasperis 26:20
Because, people say to me, “I don’t understand how you’re decarbonizing. I see the Tesla drive by, I see no emissions coming out of the exhaust, so I can see how they’re not contributing to the problem. But your car is still burning gas, right Corrado? Your plane is still burning aviation fuel, right? Your truck is still burning diesel?” That is correct, but here’s the difference. When you think of carbon sources, we break it into two categories. We call long cycle carbon, that carbon that is very deep in the earth from 100 million, or a billion, whatever many years it took to become oil. Short-cycle carbon is on the surface already. It’s already decomposing, it’s already no matter what we do it is going to contribute to the carbon in the atmosphere. So, we say, if we’re taking short-cycle carbon off of sawdust that’s just sitting there decomposing, then we’re not adding to the emission. In that context, it’s carbon neutral. It’s way better than that because what we ultimately want to do is incent the growing of many, many, many more trees. When people first hear what we’re contemplating, they think, “Oh, you’re deforesting. We’re afraid you’re going to cut down trees.” It’s the exact opposite. We have an afforestation strategy. So, think about what is a tree? A tree is a carbon sink. If you grow a tree, let’s say a hybrid poplar, which can grow in seven years. That’s seven years of decarbonizing, it’s just sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and doing what? Putting it into the roots into the ground. So, ultimately, we would like to start with the waste wood, which is short-cycle and is carbon-neutral. And then incent the growing of hybrid poplar, willow, bamboo, these fast rotation crops that, while they’re growing, they create a carbon negative situation. So, you’re starting to hear very important companies not say that their vision is a net carbon-zero world, they’re saying, “We need to go beyond zero,” because there’s a recognition that zero, the time it will take to get to zero is too late to solve the climate problems that we have. So, we have to get negative and we have to accelerate the impact. So, by growing these trees, you start decarbonizing naturally. And then, you can rotate. If you have a seven-year crop, every year, you take out one-seventh, and you’ve effectively added that decarbonizing system into the equation, and then, you’re burning carbon neutral fuels on top of it. Now, I just want to use an example, when corn ethanol took off, they built 200 plants in seven years. 200 plants in seven years. The industry is running at capacity, it achieved exactly what it wanted to achieve, and incented a tremendous amount of corn farming. About a third of our corn that we farm is used for fuel, two-thirds for food. A third is used for fuel. That was incented by the industry. We can do the exact same thing because when Columbus arrived to America, there was a billion acres of forest, today there 630 million. So, we deforested over 350 million acres unproductively. We put 100 million of those back, the problem is solved. We don’t need to do that to solve the problem because Canada has a lot of wood, South America has a lot of wood. It’s kind of fascinating when you think about it strategically, when you think about energy policy in the Middle East, and what they have in oil, think about which countries have wood. It’s North American, and South America, a little bit of Europe. There’s a shift there that’s coming strategically. But then, I’m getting a little more idealistic here now, but that’s the ideal.
Denis Phares 30:30
Well, that’s very exciting. We got net negative carbon for transportation.
Corrado De Gasperis 30:33
Net negative. And to our earlier point, it should coexist with electrification. Electrification is an important part of the solution as it matures.
Denis Phares 30:46
Well, let me wrap up here by asking one last question. When can we expect this to happen? Do we have some good news coming out this year?
Corrado De Gasperis 30:54
We have good news, yeah. Well, we announced about two months ago that we won a DOE grant. But it’s not for this solution, it’s for an enhanced pathway beyond this solution. But what’s exciting about that is we have almost all the major players, at least one representative from each part of the supply chain, sign up for this effort. So, that’s exciting. And we’re working with UNR. UNR will be where we do the pre-pilot for this new pathway, which is an enhancer. But we also announced, at that same time, that we expect our first commercialization this year. So, we’re talking about announcing the first project this year, we’ve got a handful under discussion. And I hope it’s more than one, but for sure, it’ll be this year that you hear about the first one. And then, next year, hopefully, many more.
Denis Phares 31:51
Wow. Well, we’ll be watching.
Corrado De Gasperis 31:54
Thank you, Denis. It’s a pleasure to talk about this with you.
Denis Phares 31:57
Corrado De Gasperis, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Corrado De Gasperis 31:59
Thank you. Fantastic.
Denis Phares 32:03
Thank you for joining The Li-MITLESS ENERGY Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on any of your favorite podcast platforms.
[End Of Recording]
