Carbon monoxide has been used as a fuel but not usually by itself.
The reason why we don't use it much now is that there are better, safer alternatives.
Before the widespread use of natural gas as a fuel (which consists mostly of methane) many cities piped coal gas (sometimes called town gas) to consumers as a fuel. Coal gas is made (obviously) from coal by a process that combines incomplete oxidation and the water gas shift reaction (see the details of how it evolved). The result is a gas containing both CO and H2 with some other ingredients in smaller quantities. Before electricity this gas was the dominant source of street lighting in cities and was commonly supplied for heating and cooking for much longer than that (the UK only phased it out in the 1970s and 1980s when cheap supplies of natural gas were discovered in the North Sea.)
The disadvantage of coal gas is that it isn't as good a fuel as natural gas (having a much lower calorific content) and that it is poisonous because of the CO content (which is where the trope of suicide by putting your head in the oven originated). But it is clearly possible to use a gas containing a lot of CO as a successful fuel and you don't need expensive catalysts to achieve this as it burns well in a suitable device.