Carbon monoxide is a typical by-product in the production of hydrogen by reforming of alcohols or hydrocarbons and must be reduced down to ppm levels in order to be used as feed for proton-exchange membrane fuel cells. Up to date, several options for CO removal have been studied and the selective oxidation (CO-PROX) is considered one of the most straightforward and cost-effective methods to achieve acceptable CO concentrations. The activity of CuO-CeO₂ supported on MCM-41 type mesoporous silica containing zirconium was evaluated in the preferential oxidation of CO in the presence of excess of H₂. As a reference, a Cu-Ce catalyst supported on a pure mesoporous silica was also synthesised. It is well known that the addition of ZrO₂ to CeO₂ matrix, with the formation of a solid solution, enhances the OSC capacity of the resulting mixed oxide Ce_xZr_1-xO₂, by increasing the oxygen vacancies that consequently improve the reducibility of copper. In this work we investigated the CO-PROX reaction over the Cu-Ce couple supported on a structurally organized SiO₂/ZrO₂ material, with the aim to obtain further information about the effect of zirconium in the catalyst structure when it is not in solid solution with cerium. The catalysts were characterised by elemental analysis, XRPD, H₂-TPR, TEM and XPS. All the catalysts displayed a very good performance in the 40-190°C temperature range. The catalyst containing 6 wt.% of copper and 20wt.% of cerium showed, in the technologically interesting 120-140°C range, a conversion near to 100% with a selectivity to CO₂ close to 90%.

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