With rising fuel prices, the search is on for locally grown crops for bio fuels. A crop grown here on Oahu is showing much promise.

Imagine these little seeds helping to power your home, the seeds of the Central American Jatropha Curcas tree.

"The thing about jatrophacurcis here in hawaii is we can plant it and within five months we can begin to get it flowering. So, from that initial flowering, it takes about two months before the fruits develop and mature. These are the flowers and this is how they form in clusters on the Jatropha tree," said Mike Poteet.

It bears fruit within months. Rather than years like the kukui, ripe fruit fall to the ground and bear those three oil-rich seeds.

"While showing hand of seeds nat snd up "the seeds have about 35 percent oil in them."

The Hawai'i Agriculture Research Center, with support from Hawaiian Electric, has been growing this orchard in Kunia for about two years, looking at its potential to produce Bio-Diesel.

"There's pretty high yield of vegetable oil from the crop which is great. You want to have high yield so you can count on it as a source of supply," said Hawaiian Electric spokesperson Darren Pai. "We are building a new power plant at campbell industrial park and that's going to be run entirely on biofuels."

"It grows really quickly here in hawaii, quicker than anywhere else I've seen in the world. And we think this is the kind of crop we can manage and mechanize to a degree that makes it profitable for people to grow locally," said Poteet.

The tree also has a high tolerance for drought and has the potential for other products such like latex.

"It does give us the opportunity to utilize some of our available land, keep it agricultural here in the state. Sort of re-green some of our farm land areas that have gone dormant over the last couple of decades," said Poteet.

"A lot of us growing up here remember seeing these fields green and it would be nice to keep it that way," said Pai.

But should the land be used for fuel crops versus food crops, just one of the questions considered as harc continues testing Jatropha. Poteet says it'll be several years before H.A.R.C. sees the full yield potential of the tree, by then producing more than 300 gallons of oil per acre.