Matthew Veal, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University, is leading the research into using sweet sorghum for ethanol production in North Carolina.

"Most people only grow it to make molasses. So making fuel out of it is a whole new procedure," he said.

Here's how it works: you crush the stalk, get a sugar juice, add yeast to it, the yeast metabolizes it and produces ethanol.

The process is simple. The challenge is producing it on a large scale, Veal said.

"Right now what we're really focused on is how do we produce the most amount of sugar on a per acre basis? So really focused on making the most ethanol, it comes down to how much sugar can you make?" he said. "We're trying different planting populations, different herbicide type controls, different ways to cultivate the crop during the year."

The Biofuels Center of North Carolina awarded the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering at North Carolina State University more than $180,000 to expand the research on sweet sorghum.

Veal says they can get twice as much ethanol from one acre of sweet sorghum compared to an acre of corn. And sweet sorghum could become an important crop for North Carolina farmers.

"We have a lot of soil that might not be good for agricultural production like corn and soybeans and wheat but it would be really good for a crop like sweet sorghum," he said.

The researchers think they have at least two more years of work before companies can use the crop for large scale ethanol production. But they have high hopes for it.

"A lot of people are really looking to it as maybe the biggest player ultimately," he said.

The state says that 10 percent of the liquid fuels sold in North Carolina should come from locally grown and produced biofuels by 2017.