Comstock Awarded DOE Grant for Breakthrough Cellulosic Fuels Process

Technology Unlocks Massive New Feedstock Model to Rapidly Neutralize America’s Transportation Emissions

VIRGINIA CITY, Nev., Jan. 26, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Comstock Inc. (NYSE: LODE) (“Comstock” and the “Company”) today announced the award by the U.S. Department of Energy (“DOE”) of Comstock’s $2,000,000 grant application to build a pre-pilot scale system to demonstrate one of Comstock’s unique new pathways to produce renewable diesel, sustainable aviation fuel, gasoline, and marine fuel from forestry residues and other forms of lignocellulosic biomass at dramatically improved yield, efficiency and cost in comparison to known methods.

Comstock’s technologies efficiently crack wood into a purified Cellulosic Sugar and a unique “Bioleum” hydrocarbon mixture with about 75% of the energy content of fossil crude. Together, the two streams provide the basis for an entirely new renewable fuel feedstock model with best-in-class conversion yields, efficiencies, and costs.

Cellulosic Sugar and Bioleum can be used in multiple renewable fuel production pathways, however, the DOE’s grant award is based on a unique new pathway involving fermentation of Cellulosic Sugar into lipids, reacting the lipids with Bioleum to produce a single homogenous feedstock, and converting the homogenous feedstock into drop-in renewable fuels at extraordinary yields exceeding 80 gallons per dry ton of feedstock on a gasoline gallon equivalent basis (“GGE”).

Comstock has assembled a world-class team of collaborators, including Haldor Topsoe Holding A/S, Marathon Petroleum Company LP, Novozymes A/S, Xylome Corporation, RenFuel K2B AB, Emerging Fuels Technology Inc., the University of Nevada Reno, the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Natural Resources Research Institute, and the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

“Comstock is enabling an extremely valuable new “soil to oil” ecosystem based on the sustainable growth and monetization of a massive, widely available, highly scalable, and rapidly replenishable new feedstock source for renewable fuels,” said Corrado De Gasperis, Comstock’s Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “That ecosystem will leverage existing infrastructure to neutralize mobility emissions, create thousands of high-quality jobs, invigorate America’s rural communities, and advance the Biden Administration’s 2050 objectives.”