Bu Wang didn’t set out to launch a carbon-capture company that would attract millions of dollars from major climate-focused investment firms.

In the pre-pandemic days of 2019, the associate professor of civil and environmental engineering was exploring the prospects of capturing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants—a line of research that he found, unfortunately, didn’t lead anywhere viable because of economic realities.

Amid that investigation, though, one of Wang’s postdoctoral researchers, Raghavendra Ragipani, made a fortuitous discovery. Ragipani, now an assistant professor of chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, was testing how quickly carbon dioxide reacted with coal fly ash—the waste product from coal plants—under various conditions. He found the reaction occurred remarkably faster when the ash had a higher pH (was more basic, or alkaline), a result that hadn’t been documented in existing scientific literature.

“Initially we were very surprised,” says Wang, a Wisconsin Energy Institute affiliate whose work seeks to develop more sustainable materials. “We double-checked, triple-checked the results, but it turns out to be real.”

That bit of scientific happenstance set off a chain reaction that led Wang to co-found Alithic, a company that, with the assistance of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), UW-Madison’s technology transfer partner, and outside investment, is poised to enter the growing carbon-capture industry.

The timing is welcome: After carbon emissions dropped during the pandemic, they’ve promptly rebounded and reached a new record high in 2024, according to the Global Carbon Project.