Competition with *CO2 adsorption can be resolved by a tandem reaction. Specifically, CO2 can be first reduced to CO with >95% FE, and then the produced CO can be further reduced to MeOH in a second electrolyzer free of CO2 in alkaline media. We conducted direct CO reduction in a flow cell identical to the parent CO2RR process, except that CO was used as the feed gas to achieve higher FEMeOH and jMeOH. For CoPc/SWCNT, jMeOH reaches 62.1 mA cm -2 at -0.8 VRHE with a corresponding FEMeOH of 50.5% (Fig. and Supplementary Fig. ). This corresponds to a FEMeOH of 60.1% for the tandem reaction, assuming a 95% FECO from CO2. CoPc/15 and CoPc/50 achieve jMeOHs of only 20.5 mA cm -2 and 15.5 mA cm -2 with FEMeOHs of 21.8% and 16.6%, respectively (Fig. and Supplementary Fig. ). Moreover, CORR with CoPc/SWCNT maintains a total current density of 100 mA cm -2 at a FEMeOH of ~50% for 10 h (Fig. and Supplementary Fig. ).