Sep 24, 2026 · 33 min · 10 segments
Clarion Partners Managing Director Jason Glasser joins First Draft Live to break down what OZ 2.0's smaller, more competitive map means for where capital moves next.
Jason GlasserGuest
Mark BonnerHost
The story was independently reported and can be read right now on biznow.com. Jason, welcome to First Draft Live.
so jason thanks for being here let's start with something concrete as our special project story reveals in arizona's yuma desert there's a company called evolution energy that has spent four years working towards one of the first u.s cobalt processing facilities they've got 345 million dollars in debt financing committed and an additional 850 million off take already lined up for what the plant will produce but they're still waiting on OZ equity to close the gap, hoping to raise up to $50 million.
And so the question to you, Jason, is does that match what Clarion is seeing in its own pipeline right now?
It's a good question, Mark, and you brought me on here and I'm going to tell you first off, I don't know the first thing about economics of a COBOL plan.
But what I think I am seeing here with this is what you're looking at is a highly specialized piece of infrastructure.
They're going to need likely hundreds of acres, maybe a buffer zone or room for future expansion around it.
Normally, when you're building something like that, you're looking at things with a decades-long budget.
investment horizon so you're probably not putting money in and selling after 10 years and that that could be a more challenging equity check to find in the market and i think anything that you can do as an owner or someone who's involved in the business formation of that to try to put those economics over the edge and attract those investors i think that's a smart thing to do you know from clarion's perspective we're generally looking at a slightly different type of investment what we're looking at is something that's more along the lines of say the 10-year time horizon we want to build we want to build that warehouse that can be used by a wide range of tenants we want to build that apartment community or that build for rent home that your young professional can see themselves in or your empty nester can see themselves in.
We want an asset that we think is likely to have a low level of obsolescence and that if you look to sell that in 10 years, it's still going to be very relevant.
Again, I'm not the expert in the cobalt plant, but I think that's a much longer term longer duration asset that probably benefits really greatly from the Opportunity Zone program.
One of the big tax benefits is that you can take the depreciation over time and not recapture at the end.
The story was independently reported and can be read right now on biznow.com. Jason, welcome to First Draft Live.
so jason thanks for being here let's start with something concrete as our special project story reveals in arizona's yuma desert there's a company called evolution energy that has spent four years working towards one of the first u.s cobalt processing facilities they've got 345 million dollars in debt financing committed and an additional 850 million off take already lined up for what the plant will produce but they're still waiting on OZ equity to close the gap, hoping to raise up to $50 million.
And so the question to you, Jason, is does that match what Clarion is seeing in its own pipeline right now?
It's a good question, Mark, and you brought me on here and I'm going to tell you first off, I don't know the first thing about economics of a COBOL plan.
But what I think I am seeing here with this is what you're looking at is a highly specialized piece of infrastructure.
They're going to need likely hundreds of acres, maybe a buffer zone or room for future expansion around it.
Normally, when you're building something like that, you're looking at things with a decades-long budget.
investment horizon so you're probably not putting money in and selling after 10 years and that that could be a more challenging equity check to find in the market and i think anything that you can do as an owner or someone who's involved in the business formation of that to try to put those economics over the edge and attract those investors i think that's a smart thing to do you know from clarion's perspective we're generally looking at a slightly different type of investment what we're looking at is something that's more along the lines of say the 10-year time horizon we want to build we want to build that warehouse that can be used by a wide range of tenants we want to build that apartment community or that build for rent home that your young professional can see themselves in or your empty nester can see themselves in.
We want an asset that we think is likely to have a low level of obsolescence and that if you look to sell that in 10 years, it's still going to be very relevant.
Again, I'm not the expert in the cobalt plant, but I think that's a much longer term longer duration asset that probably benefits really greatly from the Opportunity Zone program.
One of the big tax benefits is that you can take the depreciation over time and not recapture at the end.
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