###### Abstract
Some authors estimate the production of vine shoots in Spain at one million tonnes per year. If half of this amount were processed into pulp, 30% of the country's needs could be met [14]. However, vine shoots do not give satisfactory results in terms of the physical properties of the resulting pulp [15]. There is a wide range of other non-energy uses of wine-growing residues that have been tested in recent years. A few of the uses of wine-growing residues are as follows: as feedstock for a biorefinery [16], incorporated as a raw material in the manufacture of chipboards [17], as compost for mushroom cultivation [18], as a lightener and insulator in the manufacture of ceramic products for construction purposes [19], and many more. The latest developments in the use of by-products from the world's wine industry can be found in the handbook of grape processing by-products [20]. The production of charcoal is one of the ways of recovering vineyard pruning residues that has been studied in recent years [13; 21]. Some work has focused on examining the effects that some operating factors have during the pyrolysis process, such as the maximum temperature and pressure reached in the process or the size of the particles, which may have characteristics of the coal obtained [22; 23]. In another paper, the slow pyrolysis of vine pruning residues in a fixed bed reactor using CO\({}_{2}\) as a carrier gas and oxidising agent was analysed [24]. Attempts have even been made to measure the effect that the type of vine rootstock can have on the chemical composition of the shoot and, consequently, on the composition of the charcoal produced [25]. Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that, due to its size, vine cultivation in the Autonomous Community of La Rioja plays an important role in CO\({}_{2}\) fixation, through photosynthesis and the consequent transformation into organic matter in the vines. It has been estimated that, on average, for the whole of the Autonomous Community of La Rioja, vine cultivation could store 9.12 tonnes of CO\({}_{2}\) per hectare [26]. This means capturing directly from the atmosphere a value of 6.26 tCO\({}_{2}\) eq per hectare of vine cultivation [27]. It is therefore noteworthy that these studies on the production of charcoal from some type of vine cultivation waste do not appear or their environmental sustainability is only superficially evaluated. This opens up a new gap that this research aims to address and complete by identifying the environmental benefits, which, although preliminarily evaluated in certain environmental impact categories such as global warming, will lead to satisfactory results that will support future, more exhaustive environmental research through environmental assessment methodologies such as the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Considering the above, this paper will explore this new way of recovering vine shoots, investigating the technical viability of this by-product for the production of charcoal in a sustainable way. For this purpose, three different forms of pyrolysis will be generated in a conventional electric muffle furnace, whose energy source is the national electricity grid, which gives the process the ability to be extrapolated to an industrial production situation. In contrast to the current literature, where pyrolysis tests are carried out under extremely controlled conditions in laboratories in which a multitude of variables to be controlled intervene, which causes an added complexity to the study of the pyrolysis process, in this research, we have chosen to propose three simple test methods that reproduce a possible industrial production situation. To this end, the energy consumed in each test, the mass yields obtained, and the chemical composition of the resulting coal will be evaluated in order to establish the temperature and time conditions that generate a charcoal with acceptable performance for its possible use as sustainable fuel, or as a filtering element in a mortar or concrete matrix, etc.