This paper investigates several configurations for placing electrodes on a 3D cylindrical medium to reconstruct 3D images using 16 electrode EIT equipment intended for use with a 2D adjacent drive protocol. Seven different electrode placement configurations are compared in terms of the following figures of merit: resolution, radial and vertical position error, image magnitude, immunity to noise, immunity to electrode placement errors, and qualitative evaluation of image artefacts. Results show that for ideal conditions, none of the configurations considered performed significantly better than the others. However, when noise and electrode placement errors were considered the planar electrode placement configuration (two rings of vertically aligned electrodes with electrodes placed sequentially in each ring) had the overall best performance. Based on these results, we recommend planar electrode placement configuration for 3D EIT lung imaging of the thorax.