Figured out the error I was getting was: SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK.
But I'm not getting it on my Linux server, is there a way to ignore those in the ini level instead of adding the following?
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
UPDATE:
Fixed it by adding the following to my php.ini file
curl.cainfo = "C:/wamp/cert/cacert.pem"