Honeywell
Under prompting from French specialty chemical maker Arkema, the European Commission (EC), the administrative arm of the 27-nation European Union, has opened an antitrust proceeding to investigate whether an agreement between honeywell parts and DuPont to develop and produce a next-generation auto refrigerant is anticompetitive. An Arkema spokeswoman says that the firm has proprietary technology to make HFO-1234yf but that Honeywell owns application patents in Europe and the U.S. that keep Arkema from those markets. Although Arkema contests the patents, the spokeswoman says the company is also willing – First off, China. On Tuesday, Honeywell announced the first project for a U.S.-Chinese government smart grid partnership aimed at bringing faster demand response technologies to market. The north China city of Tianjin is the target, and the goal is to cut energy use in office buildings, government centers, factories and industrial facilities to prevent blackouts or forced outages when grid power demand is at its peak. It was almost a year ago when Honeywell first announced it would work with State Grid Corp. of China on demand response, which gives a sense of how slowly a bilateral government research effort can take to develop. Jeremy Eaton, VP of Honeywell Energy Solutions, wouldn From a multiples perspective, Emerson is the cheaper of the two. It trades at a respective 14.7x and 12x past and forward earnings while Honeywell trades at a respective 17.6x and 12.7x past and forward earnings. For many investors, Emerson's higher dividend yield of 3.4% merits holding an interest, but with a beta of 1.2 and uncertainty in macro trends, it is a close call. In addition to having stronger fundamentals, General Electric offers an even higher dividend yield at 3.6%, albeit with more volatility. These tough comparables will prevent investor entry. Currently, the Street rates shares of Emerson a Registering for Fast Company is easy, just fill in the blanks above and submit a comment. Once your account is approved, update your profile page and start a discussion. Your email will not be shared with the public, or any third-party advertisers. In this extended version of the talk from our latest issue, we speak with Jim Rekoske, VP for renewable energy and chemicals for Honeywell–which licenses its biofuel technology to refineries. From an adoption standpoint, the biggest challenge is making this fuel available to people. The Valero plant will take about $250 million to $300 million of investments to complete it. When it's done, it'll produce 10,000 barrels a day. That's a lot of fuel, but that's also a big investment. So someone has to be certain the technology is going to work. The Air Force Thunderbirds and Blue Angles have used our fuels. If the most advanced flight demonstration teams in the world are using it, it's clearly an advanced fuel and one that meets all the standards, even in that rigorous of an environment. Natural oils are very much like fuel. In fact, if you go back a millennium or so, these types of oils were actually used in lamps to provide light and heat for people. They burn and they're effective, but they don't look like the hydrocarbon fuels we use today. So we transform them to make them look the same. Doing the chemistry was actually pretty easy; the hard part was getting industries that don't necessarily work together on a regular basis to all come to the table and work together. We've had to orchestrate that to create a business segment. Without us in the marketplace trying to bring these people together, this segment wouldn't exist. You just don't see farmers in Montana working with energy corporations. So we've had to build bridges to make those connections.