Chris Wright, Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy, got the job during his first meeting with the former and future president.

Founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, a Colorado-based fracking services company, Mr. Wright was among about 20 oil and gas executives that Mr. Trump gathered at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in April. Mr. Wright had not met Mr. before. Trump, but got his attention by making what two people in the room described as a strong case for fossil fuels.

“Do you want to be my energy secretary?” – Mr. Trump asked, apparently jokingly, according to those present. However, days after the election, Mr. Trump chose Mr. Wright to lead the agency.

On Wednesday, Mr. Wright will appear before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. It will be the first of three confirmation hearings this week for Mr. Trump to manage the agencies at the center of his plan to increase the production and use of coal, oil and gas.

Mr. Wright was the evangelist for the cause. He often speaks in podcasts and speeches the moral argument for fossil fuelsarguing that the world’s poorest people need oil and gas to realize the benefits of modern life.

It has also distorted climate science, researchers and activists say. For example, Mr. Wright incorrectly claimed in a podcast last year that the United Nations’ top scientific body had found climate change to be “a slow, modest impact two or three generations from now.”

In fact, the scientific body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has recommended that countries immediately and drastically phase out fossil fuels to prevent the planet from crossing a critical global warming threshold.

Meg Bloomgren, a spokeswoman for Mr. Wright, said in a statement that he has spent his career focusing on improving lives, “including studying and establishing that climate change is real and a problem we must solve together with relentless American innovation and technological solutions. “

Democrats on Tuesday expressed mixed feelings about Mr. Wright.

Sen. John Hickenlooper of Colorado described him as smart and thoughtful on energy issues, but said he remained concerned about how Mr. Wright and other cabinet members to address climate change.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said Mr Trump’s appointees were “here to loot our public treasury and pollute our public spaces”.

He noted that the Mar-a-Lago event was where Mr. Trump asked oil industry leaders raised a billion dollars for his campaign and he promised that companies would save far more than that when he repealed climate regulations, according to those present. “Trump’s big donors want revenge,” Mr Whitehouse said.

Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the hearings would be an opportunity to discuss what he called the failures of the Biden administration’s energy policy.

“With high energy prices hurting Americans and restrictive policies limiting access to public lands and critical resources, it is critical to prioritize domestic energy production and restore trust in public land management,” said Mr. Lee.

On Thursday, Mr. Lee’s committee will hear from Douglas J. Burgum, the Republican former governor of North Dakota, whom Mr. Trump picked for the Interior Department. Also Thursday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will consider Lee Zeldin, a former United States representative from Long Island, to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

If he is confirmed as the head of the Ministry of Energy, Mr. Wright would help oversee the approval of LNG export terminals, which the Biden administration has tried to slow, angering Republicans.

Mr. Wright graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and did graduate work on solar energy at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, he founded the company Pinnacle Technologies, which created software for measuring the movement of fluids beneath the Earth’s surface. Software helped revolutionize the commercial shale gas industry.

Mr. Wright started Liberty Energy in 2011, and the company has worked with others on geothermal power and small, modular nuclear reactors.

Mr. Wright holds 2.6 million shares in the company, which at the current share price are worth more than $55 million. AND a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission he put his compensation last year at $5.6 million.

Mr. Wright filed a separate document with the SEC after Mr. Trump’s pick for energy secretary, indicating he intends to retire from Liberty Energy. A transition official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the financial statements were not yet public, said Mr. Wright intends to sell his shares once this is confirmed.

Democrats sought to delay Mr. Wright’s hearing because they had not received his financial statements, documents that are usually released before the confirmation process. Republicans refused to postpone the hearings.

Senate officials said Mr. Wright became available to lawmakers late Tuesday, although they were not yet publicly available online from the Office of Government Ethics.