Honeywell (finally) wraps up full technology stack
This week Honeywell Technologies employees welcomed about 2,000 new colleagues at their offices around the world. It has been a busy week for the company with numerous welcome and on-boarding meetings. All round there has been a lot of ice breaking and name learning, and probably a bit of name forgetting as well.
This is the first week of integration after the company closed the purchase of Johnson Matthey’s (JM’s) Catalyst Technologies (CT) business last week.
This deal has been a long time in the making. The initial announcement was released on May 22nd, 2025 with a valuation of the CT business at £1.8bn. The deal closed 14 months later with a revised enterprise value of £1.325bn, a 26% decrease.
“JM and Honeywell have also agreed to amend the financial terms of the transaction to reflect CT’s business performance during 2025/26, which includes the deferral of key sustainable solutions licensing projects and reduced profitability from the supply of catalysts due to the challenging market environment,” stated a Johnson Matthey press release in February 2026. “Accordingly, JM has agreed to sell the CT business to Honeywell for an enterprise value of £1.325 million on a cash and debt-free basis.”
SAF Investor has been told that the timeline for the deal was not extended in relation to the financials but due to the lengthy regulation and antitrust requirements.
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The acquisition connects Honeywell Technologies’ process technology and automation capabilities with CT’s catalyst and processing experience to create full end-to-end technology stacks. This includes multiple sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) pathways.
“The actual renewable fuel portfolio is significantly expanding. Then outside of those areas, you start to look at just the broad synergy … There’s a lot of upstream downstream end-to-end solution opportunities,” a representative close to the deal tells SAF Investor.
The two companies are already working on SAF projects together, especially in the Fischer-Tropsch pathway, such as DG Fuels in the US and Carbon Neutral Fuels in the UK. On these projects, Johnson Matthey’s FT CANS technology integrates with Honeywell’s FT Unicracking technology to upgrade synthetic crude oil into SAF. The two companies have been collaborating on this pathway since 2024.
The acquisition consolidates these two technologies into one house as well as other pathways such as methanol-to-jet, where CT’s eMERALD methanol technology, producing e-methanol, can be upgraded to SAF using Honeywell Technologies’ UOP eFining process.
This has significant benefits for SAF producers wanting to use these technologies.
“It is very different from just purchasing patents or technology. The patents are right there, but you need the knowledge, the people that have been working on the technology to really make it work,” a source tells us.
This integration of expertise and technologies presents an opportunity to bring additional efficiencies and optimisation to SAF projects.
“There’s a difference between a collaboration which enables you to provide an end-to-end solution, versus, let’s really sit down and look at the basic engineering design, [and ask] where can we make real CAPEX savings? Where we can make real OPEX savings to actually drive down those costs,” a source tells us.
“Whenever you go from methanol to jet fuel, for example, the olefins quality that’s needed for the oligomerisation step to produce the jet fuel is not as pure as what’s needed if you’re just producing the olefins for an external market,” our source continues.
That means a single methanol-to-jet facility, which enables eliminating multiple pieces of major equipment as well as a reduction on utilities vs a traditional MTO process.
“So that’s a big CAPEX saving, estimated to be roughly a 30% equipment saving, as well as OPEX savings. In all of these other technologies you start to look at potential for technical integration to drive beyond just the value integration.”
This deep technical integration should help mitigate technology risks. Being able to deal with one technology licensor also has the benefit for project developers having one point of contact across the technology stack, one set of guarantees, which should help lower technology risk and facilitate more efficient investment decisions.
The first week of onboarding 2,000 new colleagues is now complete. The HR department will be looking forward to the weekend. But the work on consolidating the new technology stacks is just beginning at Honeywell Technologies. Project developers and investors alike will be watching with keen interest as the real integration work begins.
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