All exploration and production projects have significant uncertainties and at least some of these generate substantial risks. Understanding, quantifying and knowing how to manage these risks and uncertainties is in today's turbulent business environment indispensable. Based on this fact this master thesis pursued the main goal to identify best practices and lessons learnt from the implementation of risk management in exploration and production capital projects. The theoretical part of the thesis starts with an introduction to risk management and risk assessment techniques and also delivers representative case studies and the specific case of an industry partner to demostrate how risk management is carried out in the industry. Furthermore this part provides overviews about survey methods and benchmarking. Within the empirical part of the thesis the current status of the risk management in the oil and gas industry was elaborated by a survey. This took in account the organization of risk management in the business: responsibilities, structure, knowledge management, methods and software tools. In addition respondends personal interpretations about actual barriers and future trends where captured. Informations gained through this study are then analysed and summarised. Through the combination of these results with the theory best practices are identified. Finally based on the comparison of the risk management of best practices with the current praxis of an industry partner, recommendations for improving risk management in this company are provided.