Zach Spencer: What is the total addressable market of the combination of markets that the company is pursuing? So you lost the fuels, AI, metals, mining technology?
Corrado De Gasperis: The total addressable markets are astronomical. So if you think about — let me be pedantic and but careful, okay? The amount of transportation burn in the United States alone is 150 billion gallons. Today, renewable fuels represent a couple of billion of those gallons. Ethanol is 15 billion, fuel renewable, drop in fuels, like renewable diesel, et cetera, 2 billion, 3 billion max, okay. So that market is monstrous and barely touched. So that’s what we love about the fuels business, and we’re just talking about the United States, and that’s per year, per year, we’re just talking about the United States per year a immediate revenue, immediate capability for the customers that are adopting this tech. Why did we move to a licensing technology?
Because you have companies like Marathon, right, that are already the largest renewable fuel producers in the country, looking, already allocating hundreds of millions, billions of dollars of capital to expand their renewable footprint. Why can’t they go faster? There’s feedstock constraints, vegetable oils are not sufficient, right, to feed the growth, to support the carbon-neutral targets that everybody has already laid out for themselves. By 2030, by 2050, so if you’ve got a carbon target for 2030 and you run out of feedstock in 2027, what are you going to do? I’m telling you what they’re doing is they’re looking for alternatives, and we believe we’re best positioned to unblock that bottleneck. So that market, just in the United States alone, just the United States alone, right, is massive for us.
It would be €“ it could be billions in revenue and certainly valuation. So Canada is twice as big in terms of its feedstock sources as been United States with woody biomass. We’re talking with international players that have feedback sources now in North and South America. So that’s the fuels. Metals, you heard me say it. I almost want to say the opposite for the moment, okay? The EV industry, the electrification industry is obviously growing, okay? I have a view of this. I believe electrification is a part of the solution. I am not on this bandwagon that the world is going to electrify cars 100%. It’s not possible. There is nowhere near the virgin minerals required to do that. Now could it be 10%, could it be 15%? Yes. Could it be concentrated in metro areas, where emissions are really choking people off?
Yes. But — why are you going to electrify Wyoming. It doesn’t make sense to us, first of all. So we believe in the growth, we believe it’s meaningful. We also believe it’s critical to recycle. Having said that, how quickly are these batteries coming out of production? Well, it’s extending? Is it six years? Is it eight years? Could it be 10 years? When they come out of production, what do they do with them? Well, a lot of people are starting to repurpose them for stationary uses, oh boy, okay? So that curve is going up. But we don’t see it going up as fast. Is it critical, right, to perfect your technology and its readiness? Yes. Is it critical to be able to produce battery-grade metals? Yes. Okay. But we need to think about the pace that we deploy capital and for what purpose.
So we love the idea of having a TRL 6, TRL 7 operating system, producing salable metals from all sources that are profitable and then letting that business grow. We think it will be a very big business someday. Total addressable market today is much smaller. Now when you start talking about GenMat, it’s ubiquitous. There’s — I can’t — if you want — you’re talking about addressable market, right? What is it? You know, all of the materials, the R&D budgets of all of the largest material science companies in the world. You could look at it from a number of different ways, but it’s ubiquitous. I mean, it touches almost everything. You know, so we don’t — we haven’t quantified it in total, but we have quantified the markets that have the biggest bottlenecks, the biggest constraints and are struggling, like silicon chips, okay.
They need more power. They’re about Moore’s Law is going to become Moore’s Wall. They’re going to smash into a constraint. And so how do you enhance thermal connectivity? How do you enhance electrical conductivity? How do you modify the band gap for a different result? GenMat knows how to do that. The difference is it doesn’t take them years, right, for an incremental improvement. They can do it in day. They can do it in minutes. So if someone — if you take any one of these silicon chip companies, they got a $20 billion R&D budget, you can imagine how they’re spending that money. We can make dramatic improvements with them for them with these kinds of solutions. So there’s just so many ways you can go with it. But what we want to do, what’s very important for us to communicate in 2023, is having an early adopter for material simulation, have an early adopter for mineral exploration and discovery.
Okay. You have two world-class companies using a world-class technology, and then it gets very exciting from there.
Corrado De Gasperis: Corrado for Comstock Inc. Can you give us a time line on revenue streams? So we’re trying to do that with this call, okay? So 2023, at least one license with a major fuel company, when that happens, this game has changed completely. Because you will have, remember, millions of dollars of upfront fees for engineering support, okay? That’s a validation. You will have a known royalty percentage. We can very easily project based on the size of the customer’s facility, what that will translate into dollars. But then you’ll be able to extrapolate. Once you have a known number, you’ll be able to extrapolate, it will be irresponsible for us to do that until we have that and then we’ll be able to extrapolate. Obviously, we have models. We have projections. They’re very exciting. They won’t be credible until we get that first one that’s coming this year.
Zach Spencer: Okay. One of our listeners hasn’t been able to read the entire 10-K yet. So