Getting started with carbon removal

Learn how to use our CDR Platform and start purchasing carbon dioxide removal in only a few minutes.

Quick start

Our carbon removal platform is designed to be simple to use and get you up and running fast.

You need an API key

To make requests to our API you will need an API key. First go to the API key section of your organisation settings and generate an API key. Make sure to note it down somewhere safe as we will only show you your API key once.

Installing dependencies

Our API is available over HTTP using RESTful principals.

Currently we do not offer any language-specific SDKs so we recommend using common or builtin libraries for web requests in the language of your choice.

Some possible libraries:

Basic usage

In our test case we want to know the price of removing 100kg of CO₂ with a combination of kelp sinking and bio-oil injection.

We will use the command line tool HTTPie in our examples below.

How to read the commands

Our commands below are typed into a terminal and we have a special syntax that's important to note:

• Lines beginning with a $ represent a line in the terminal. The $ should not be typed.
• Lines beginning with $ # represent a comment and are there to help provide additional information.

$ # This is a comment
$ echo "This is a command"

What are we building?

Below is the final request that we will be explaining:

$ http POST https://api.cdrplatform.com/v1/cdr/price/ \
    'Authorization:Api-Key {{ your_api_key }}' \
    currency=usd \
    weight_unit=kg \
    items:='[
      {"method_type": "bio-oil", "cdr_amount": 50},
      {"method_type": "kelp-sinking", "cdr_amount": 50}
    ]'

Choose your endpoint

We want to make a request to find out how much it costs to purchase some CO₂ removal.

$ # Make a request to calculate the CDR price
$ http POST https://api.cdrplatform.com/v1/cdr/price/

More detailed information is available in our Open API schema.

Using the API key

The API key should be present in the HTTP Authorization header under the Api-Key value. In the example below, replace {{ your_api_key }} with the key you created earlier in this document.

$ http POST https://api.cdrplatform.com/v1/cdr/price/ \
    'Authorization:Api-Key {{ your_api_key }}'

More detailed information is available in our docs for authentication.

Making a price request

To receive a price request we need to supply some information:

• The currency we would like the price in (in our example: usd).
• The unit of weight we are sending (in our example: kg).
• Which removal methods we would like to use and the amount of each of them.
  • 50kg of CDR via bio-oil injection.
  • 50kg of CDR via kelp sinking.

$ http POST https://api.cdrplatform.com/v1/cdr/price/ \
    'Authorization:Api-Key {{ your_api_key }}' \
    currency=usd \
    weight_unit=kg \
    items:='[
      {"method_type": "bio-oil", "cdr_amount": 50},
      {"method_type": "kelp-sinking", "cdr_amount": 50}
    ]'

You should receive the following response (truncated HTTP Headers for simplicity) with a HTTP 201 status code:

HTTP/1.1 201 Created

{
    "cost": {
        "items": [
            {
                "cdr_amount": 50,
                "cost": 3000,
                "method_type": "bio-oil"
            },
            {
                "cdr_amount": 50,
                "cost": 1250,
                "method_type": "kelp-sinking"
            }
        ],
        "removal": 4250,
        "total": 4620,
        "variable_fees": 370
    },
    "currency": "usd",
    "weight_unit": "kg"
}

The costs returned are in the lowest denominator of our selected currency (in our example US dollar cents) so to understand what we have got back:

More detailed information is available in our docs for pricing and billing.

Making a request to purchase carbon removal

Now that we know how much our selected removal is going to cost, we can go ahead and make the purchase. The information required is exactly the same, all we need to do is switch from the pricing to the purchase endpoint.

From the pricing endpoint: https://api.cdrplatform.com/v1/cdr/price/

To the CDR purchasing endpoint: https://api.cdrplatform.com/v1/cdr/

$ http POST https://api.cdrplatform.com/v1/cdr/ \
    'Authorization:Api-Key {{ your_api_key }}' \
    currency=usd \
    weight_unit=kg \
    items:='[
      {"method_type": "bio-oil", "cdr_amount": 50},
      {"method_type": "kelp-sinking", "cdr_amount": 50}
    ]'

Upon successfully ordering your carbon removal you will receive the following response (truncated HTTP Headers for simplicity) with a HTTP 201 status code:

HTTP/1.1 201 Created

{
    "transaction_uuid": "044e60ec-3a7b-40be-b215-9d998810fafa"
}

The transaction UUID is unique to your removal request and can be stored in your records to query at a later date.

More detailed information is available in our docs for removal requests.

Getting help

Things go wrong (especially in IT!) - if you're having troubles at all please reach out using one of the methods below and we will happily help you.

Submit an issue

Our API and our documentation is open-source! If you are comfortable with GitHub you can open an issue directly and help accelerate the progress of this project.

Contact us

You can contact us with feedback, suggestions or problems at: [email protected]

We would love to hear from you!