perforated across the entire production zone the corner wells of this pattern at the hexagon corners are again drilled horizontally but in this instance their well bores are oriented radially toward the center well in the pattern these wells again are kept as near the bottom plane of the producing zone and all are perforated along their entire horizontal extent the well placement pattern of fig2 a is most useful in relatively thin producing intervals while the pattern of fig2 b is more useful in thicker production sands the techniques of the present invention may differ slightly according to the thickness of the producing zone as outlined above however these techniques may be broken down into four major steps these steps are 1 drill vertical injection wells and horizontal production wells into the production zone as described above with respect to fig1 a and 1b 2 produce both oil and sand from both the production wells and injection wells cold without the use of steam cold production can be achieved by producing oil and sand simultaneously using either a progressive cavity pump a screw pump or a jet pump typically in 12 u00b0 api heavy oil very high sand content 40 to 50 by volume is produced during the first few weeks of production sand production then typically declines slowly to about 10 over a period of about 100 days continued small percentages of sand production are associated with the oil production it has been found that from 3 to 8 of the total oil in place can be produced from this commingled oil and sand production 3 when production from step 2 becomes not economical start low pressure about 250 psi steam injection in both the injection wells and the producing wells.