This work presents an evaluation of a high performance series of water gas shift (WGS) catalysts in the preferential CO oxidation reaction (PrOx) in order to examine the applicability of the same catalyst for both processes as a first step for coupling both reactions in a single process. Gold based catalysts are applied in an extensive study of the CO-PrOx reaction parameters, such as lambda, WHSV, CO concentration and [H2O]/[CO2] ratio in order to obtain the best activity/selectivity balance. CO and H-2 oxidation reactions were treated separately in order to establish the degree of CO/H-2 oxidation competition. Additionally the catalysts behavior in the CO-PrOx parallel reactions such a WGS and RWGS have been also carried out to analyze their effect on product composition. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.