What does a carbon extraction engine actually do?
Most businesses already have the information they need to calculate a large part of their carbon emissions.
It’s sitting in electricity bills, gas bills, fuel invoices, mileage records and refrigeration paperwork.
The problem is that none of those documents arrives with a neat little box saying “your carbon emissions are…”
Somebody still has to find the activity data, work out what it means, apply the right conversion factors and turn it into a usable report.
That’s the job Green Citation’s carbon extraction engine was built to do.
Start with the paperwork you’ve already got
You don’t need to manually type every figure into a carbon calculator.
Upload your documents one at a time and Green Citation reads the activity data directly from them.
That might be:
- kWh of electricity or gas
- litres of petrol or diesel
- business mileage
- refrigerant added and recovered
- waste and transport activity covered by Scope 3 Light
These are the numbers that tell us what actually happened.
Not what you spent. What you used.
Then the carbon calculation happens
Once the activity data has been extracted, Green Citation applies the relevant UK Government DESNZ greenhouse gas conversion factors.
The reporting period matters here.
DESNZ publishes new conversion factors each year, so Green Citation uses the factor set that applies to the period being reported rather than simply applying today’s factors to historical activity.
That’s an important distinction if you’re producing carbon data you may later need to compare, share or evidence.
Some documents are straightforward. Others really aren’t.
An electricity bill showing a clear kWh figure is relatively simple.
Refrigeration paperwork is a different story.
F-gas and refrigerant records can contain added and recovered quantities in tables, service notes or compliance forms. Green Citation reads those figures and calculates the net refrigerant loss using the appropriate global warming potential for the refrigerant recorded.
Mileage and transport records have their own calculation requirements too.
The point is that you shouldn’t need to understand all of those calculations yourself just to turn records your business already holds into carbon data.
And if a document can’t be read properly, Green Citation doesn’t invent the missing information. Templates are available so you can provide the activity data in a format the engine can process.
No guesswork.
What comes out the other end?
Once you’ve finished processing your records, Green Citation produces your emissions data across the Scope 1, Scope 2 and supported Scope 3 Light categories you’ve provided information for.
The finished output is available as PDF, CSV and JSON.
More importantly, the figures remain traceable to the source information used to calculate them.
So you’re not simply handed a carbon number and expected to trust it.
You can see what went into it.
What about your documents?
This mattered to me when I built Green Citation.
Your business records shouldn’t need to sit indefinitely in somebody else’s system just because you wanted to calculate your carbon emissions.
Green Citation processes each document for the information needed and does not retain the uploaded document afterwards.
Your finished reports are downloaded by you.
How long does it take?
That depends on how many records you have.
But the calculation itself isn’t something that needs to take days or weeks.
Upload the record. It takes seconds for Green Citation to read a document, then you’re straight onto the next one. A whole year’s worth of records doesn’t have to take any time at all. The idea is simple: it’s done before your cuppa gets cold.
For businesses keeping their reporting up to date month by month, it becomes a small piece of regular admin rather than a large carbon-reporting exercise at the end of the year.
And that’s really the point of the carbon extraction engine.
You already have the paperwork. Green Citation turns what’s in it into usable carbon data.
For businesses keeping their reporting up to date month by month, it becomes a small piece of regular admin rather than a large carbon-reporting exercise at the end of the year.
And that’s really the point of the carbon extraction engine.
You already have the paperwork. Green Citation turns what’s in it into usable carbon data.