As I go on my marketing rounds, I went and visited Dato’ R. We went quaffing and dungeon crawling … nope wrong blog. I gotta stop playing Nethack.
Anyhow, he shared with me that he and his team has installed electrical submersible pumps (ESPs) in a Malaysian operations environment. The units are installed using CTUs as opposed to drilling rigs (to the workover engineers among you, can you explain why this is important?). The ESPs are Western Submersible Pumps.
Gaslift now has competion. Some of the ESP advantages I can think of are:
- less compression capacity is required, as the volume of recirculated gas is reduced.
- Improved controllability: flowrate only depends on pump perfomance curves, rather than say, compressor availability.
- Mature Tech: someone count how many ESPs are in Acheh.
Though I think that use of ESPs indicate that Malaysian fields are acknowledged to be on the decline.
Wata - Malaysian Oil and Gas Engineer 
Workovers are not cost effective in a well in its end of life phase.
Not really practical running a completion string with coil as it tends to buckle when compression is applied. Process is very tedious.
One American oil operator use them in Qatar.