"What price do you folks believe will be necessary in order for the company to move ahead with la balasa?"

Not so much the price of copper, but cold hard cash!

Sure if Dr. Copper goes north of 3 bucks and stays there, but who is predicting that over the short or medium term?

BCU doesn't have the option of waiting until 2010/2011 for world base metal demand to really kick into gear.

Where is BCU going to get the funding for La Balsa? The reason they switched to Kabba (and put La Balsa simmering on the 'front' burner) is they had no choice.

With no funding available for the Mexican project, they began dropping non-essential properities to perserve cash and have placed their bet on what they believe could be the discovery that "pops' this stock: Kabba

And they had to tap into the legacy investors, i.e. those million plus shareholders to get the dice going on drilling in Arizona.

At Kabba, Bell now has to find what all the previous nine other mining companies could not: a discovery.

So pray tell: how are they going to fund La Balsa's development in today's market?

Either bring in a "financing" partner or do a PP. And right now, there's little chance of the latter and I wouldn't hold my breath on the latter.

This company has been in survival mode since the crash of late last year, so if you want to "hope", get down on your knees and pray for Marsh's model on Kabba to be right where many other pros have been proven wrong.

If nothing pans out in these 5 Kabba wells...it looks like the bells will toll for BCU.