The centralized production of fuels, chemicals, and fertilizers by thermocatalytic processes sustained by fossil resources is a pillar of modern societies. Electrocatalytic transformations of the abundant small molecules, water, carbon dioxide, dinitrogen, and methane, are emerging routes. Their coupling with renewable sources such as sun power may give rise to a distributed model based on small-scale reactors, so-called artificial leaves. Realizing this vision calls for improved catalytic performance, efforts on reactor and process engineering, and supportive regulatory frameworks. This work puts emphasis in analyzing the core challenge of catalytic performance by defining a common set of figures of merit. This analysis is nuanced by peculiarities inherent to the proposed scheme. This perspective thus aspires to (1) provide a bird's-eye view of the gap separating them from practical values, (2) identify sources of inefficiency, and (3) establish a qualitative comparison among their feasibility, resulting in H 2 O >> CO 2 R N 2 > CH 4 .Small Molecules as Building Blocks for Fuels, Chemicals, and Fertilizers Nature is inclined toward light elements developing complexity. Living beings are almost exclusively (99%) composed of only 4 elements: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. 1 This fact may be related to stable chemical bonds formed among them, a desirable property to build the complex molecules required for life (e.g., the typical C-C bond-dissociation energy is 360 kJ mol À1 in long-chain molecules). 2 Nevertheless, the stability of these bonds usually increases as the size of the molecules decrease, making dinitrogen (945 kJ mol À1 ), carbon dioxide (532 kJ mol À1 ), water (497 kJ mol À1 ), and methane (439 kJ mol À1 ) very stable end products. Water and carbon dioxide are energy deadends, in contrast to dinitrogen and especially methane, due to the reduced formal oxidation state of nitrogen and carbon atoms. These very abundant molecules are thus efficient and versatile platforms for storing renewable energy into fuels and/or producing valuable compounds for other uses.