Electrochemical CO₂ reduction is emerging as a compelling route for renewable energy storage and carbon neutrality. Focus on improving catalyst selectivity and energy efficiency resulted in a surge of catalysis-centered research. The advent of artificial intelligence and high-throughput screening enables parallelized catalyst characterization to accelerate discovery, but their implementation into application-relevant device configurations is challenging. We present a scalable, high-throughput platform based on infrared thermography that preserves realistic electrochemical environments from lab to industrially relevant scales. We demonstrate the spatial and electrochemical homogeneity of a 16-well parallel electrolyzer and validate a combinatorial testing approach using copper-based catalysts with varied loadings and precursor chemistries. The results highlight how activity trends can be rapidly mapped under controlled conditions, while also revealing the limitations of activity-only combinatorial testing, particularly for multiproduct electrochemical applications in complex environments like CO₂ electrolysis on Cu. This platform thus provides an efficient pre-screening tool to accelerate catalyst discovery when analyzed appropriately and paired with follow-up single catalyst testing.

Low-temperature carbon dioxide electrolysis (CO₂E) provides a one-step means of converting CO₂ into carbon-based fuels using electrical inputs at temperatures below 100 °C. Over the past decade, an abundance of work has been carried out at ambient temperature, and high CO₂E rates and product selectivities have been achieved. With scaling of CO₂E technologies underway, greater discourse surrounding heat management and the viable operating temperatures of larger systems is important. In this Perspective we argue that, owing to the energy inefficiency of electrolysers, heat generation in CO₂E stacks will favour operating temperatures of between 40 and 70 °C, far from the ambient temperatures used so far. Such elevated temperatures put further pressure on catalyst and membrane stability and on the stack design. On the other hand, elevated temperatures could alleviate challenges in salt precipitation, water management and high cell voltages, aiding the technology. We reflect on these aspects and discuss the opportunities for waste heat valorization to increase the economic feasibility of the process.