A watchdog group that opposes fracking for natural gas released a report on Wednesday that criticizes the president’s choice to be energy secretary, Ernest J. Moniz, for failing to disclose in an energy study that he led his ties to the natural gas industry.

According to the report, prepared by the group, Public Accountability Initiative, Mr. Moniz “took a lucrative position on the board of ICF International, a consulting firm with significant oil and gas ties, just prior to the release of the report,” which the group described as having “an extremely industry-friendly message.” ICF, the study noted, sells a gas market analysis tool and consults with gas industry trade groups. Mr. Moniz has received $306,000 from ICF since 2011, the group said.

The report that Mr. Moniz led at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative called “The Future of Natural Gas” was released in its final form in June 2011, but an “interim report” had appeared a year earlier. Mr. Moniz joined the board of ICF International three days before the final report was released, according to the Public Accountability Initiative.

The initiative also took issue with some of the M.I.T. report’s conclusions and was critical of its assessment that the environmental issues posed by fracking were “challenging but manageable.’’

In a response to questions posed by the group, and included as an appendix to the report, a spokeswoman for the program Mr. Moniz heads, Victoria Ekstrom, said, “The notion that these findings are developed based on anything other than the unbiased research of M.I.T. researchers is false.”

She said that the natural gas report, along with parallel reports on coal, nuclear power and the electric grid, were “prepared by the faculty and researchers at M.I.T., and received input from an advisory committee that was drawn from energy experts – including representatives from environmental organizations and relevant industry.”

And, she pointed out, the study said that “a concerted coordinated effort by industry and government, both state and federal, should be organized so as to minimize the environmental impacts of shale gas development.’’

In a statement, the White House said that President Obama favors natural gas as part of his “all of the above” strategy, and that Mr. Moniz’s “work at M.I.T. demonstrates his ability to work collaboratively with a wide spectrum of stakeholders on a broad range of energy issues.”

The Energy Department sponsored the early research work that today allows massive production of gas from shale, with a technique called hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking. Most of that work was done shortly before Mr. Moniz first came to the department, as under secretary of energy during President Clinton’s second term. But the federal agencies with the most direct role over fracking now are the Department of the Interior, which controls drilling on publicly held land, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which sets regulations on hazardous materials use on both public and private land.

The series of reports from the M.I.T. Energy Initiative have been exhaustive; the natural gas report took three years to produce and ran 178 pages, including appendices. But they have not always been right; the 2003 study on nuclear power, for example, underestimated the price of building a new reactor by at least half.

The Energy Initiative itself has major ties to energy companies. It recently announced that ENI, the Italian oil company, had renewed its participation as a founding member and would contribute at a level that “significantly exceeds the founding member support level of five million dollars per year.’’ Other corporate founding members are BP, Shell and Saudi Aramco. Other sponsors include Chevron and several utilities, including the parent company of Southern California Edison, Entergy, Duke Energy and Électricité de France, all nuclear reactor operators.

The announcement of Mr. Moniz’s nomination won praise from many mainstream environmental organizations, but some, especially those focused on fracking, reacted unfavorably.