The Orito field located in the South of Colombia, near the Ecuadorian border has been in production since 1967 and is operated by the Colombian state oil company, Ecopetrol (originally discovered and exploited by Texaco). Petrominerales signed an Incremental Production Contract agreement in April 2001 to participate with Ecopetrol in increasing production from the field. Under the terms of the agreement Petrominerales invest 100% of any development activity in return for a portion of the value of the incremental production. The Orito reservoir is a multi layered reservoir with three production intervals: Pepino, Villeta and Caballos at depths of 3000 ft TVD and 7000 ft TVD respectively. The reservoirs are depleted and pressures are below the original bubble point pressure. The wells can exhibit a number of challenges for production of fluids using artificial lift including: scale; solids production; high GOR; early high water production; and also very high CO2 (80%). Solids issues are exacerbated on wells where hydraulic frac jobs have been performed, which have resulted in a number of premature failures (less than 14 days) of ESP systems. Artificial lift has been applied to the field and most lift methods have been tried at some point including Electric Submersible Pumps (ESPs), Rod Pumps, Gaslift, Jet Pumps and Progressing Cavity Pumps (PCPs). This paper will: identify the challenges associated with each lift method in this operating environment; present a lift method selection philosophy; provide details of a pilot program to convert Gas lifted wells to rod pump and; document the key steps taken to evolve an ESP design capable of producing the solids from the fractured wells. Introduction The Orito field is located in the South of Colombia beside the town of Putumayo, near the border with Ecuador (figure 1). The Orito field is almost 17 miles 2 (43 km2) in area and is situated in the Putumayo basin. The field originally contained more than 1 billion bbl of oil-in-place, in three primary reservoirs. The most significant is the Cretaceous Caballos formation, a complex series of fluvial/ deltaic and marginal marine sands that originally contained more than 700 million bbl of oil-inplace and is still the main productive interval. The Caballos zone, alone, has produced 191 million bbl since the field was discovered in 1963. Through an Incremental Production Contract Petrominerales invest to reactivate existing wells or to drill new wells and has been doing so since 2001. Since commencing operations in the Orito field Petrominerales have worked over 47 wells and drilled 28 new wells. An active drilling program is being pursued resulting in approximately 1 new well per month. As part of the standard completion procedure new wells are hydraulically fractured, as this has been shown to increase well inflow performance significantly. Within the Orito field there are 3 hydrocarbon bearing intervals: Pepino from depths of 1500- 2500 ft, Villeta from 5000 - 6500 ft; and the Caballos at 6500 – 7500ft as shown in figure 2. Typically, Petrominerales target the Caballos formation as the primary zone of interest. The production parameters for each interval are shown in table 1. Current production from the field is almost 21,000 bfpd with an oil rate of 6700 bfpd. While potential for the field is high, increasing the production rate from the field has proven to be difficult due to: the highly heterogeneous nature of the formation making picking of new well locations difficult; rapidly increasing watercut; challenges with uptime of artificial lift equipment; and serious delays in undertaking optimization work.