Please find attached the locations of the proposed (or confirmed?) oil drilling sites some 40 km off Koh Samui. As you can see from the logo in the top right corner, the source of the atttached document is Nucoastal, the company that will do the drilling.

Thai Energy Minister recently declined to revoke plans for the drillings and said that oil spills will not happen. I do not know to laugh or to cry. Perhaps both.

However, before any spills occur, I wonder will it be possible to see the oil rigs from Chaweng, Lamai, Laem Set and other eastern and southern beaches of Koh Samui? And from the hills above these beaches with so many expensive villas..

Perhaps other Thaivisa members can help to do the calculations. It will of course depend on the size of the equipment that Nucoastal is going to install at these locations, some say it is going be about 50 m high.

I sincerely hope that the answer is no, because otherwise who will be willing to spend their holidays (and money) enjoying views to oil rigs?

PS. Also, here is a bit on who is going to drill. Nucoastal is a Thai subsidiary of what they say is a British company Coastal Energy, whose shares are traded at LSE. Here is what LSE has to say about it:

'This company is a Non-UK registered company and as such not all fields of data are available at this time

The registered office of Coastal Energy is, according to its corporate web site, at Cayman Islands, a famous tax heaven

Topic discussed at length here , links to newspaper reports show sites.

Closed.