Emails show the journalist and businessman wrote to UK energy minister to tell him about a US company with ‘fascinating new technology’

An influential Conservative member of the House of Lords has been accused of lobbying the government for the benefit of the coal industry, despite previously saying he does not argue for the industry’s interests.

Viscount Matt Ridley, a journalist and businessman, benefits financially from coalmines on his estate and has used his column in the Times newspaper to downplay the seriousness of climate change.

The former chairman of Northern Rock wrote to energy minister Lord Bourne in April to tell him about a Texas-based company with “fascinating new technology, which may well interest the Department of Energy and Climate Change”.

The email, released after a freedom of information request, tells Bourne the company’s technology: “represents a PROFITABLE [sic] use for CO2 emissions from power stations, by turning them into cheap chemical feedstocks with a new process.” The company, said Ridley, is “interested in talking to the British government”.

“I have no vested interest in this, except perhaps a faint hope that it might give Northumbrian coalmining jobs a new lease of life,” he told Bourne.

Ridley receives payments from opencast coalmines operating on his ancestral estate in Northumberland, though he declines to say how much. In 2014, he said: “I deliberately do not argue directly for the interests of the modern coal industry and I consistently champion the development of gas reserves. So I consistently argue against my own financial interest.”

Friends of the Earth (FoE) campaigner Guy Shrubsole said: “We think it’s worrying that climate sceptic Viscount Ridley should be using his privileged position in the Lords to argue against renewable energy, whilst lobbying to benefit a coal industry he has a significant financial interest in.

“Ridley has always maintained his own coal interests are immaterial to his climate sceptic views and political activities,” Shrubshole said. “This disclosure paints a different picture – of a peer who attacks clean energy whilst seeking to extend the lifetime of the coal industry in this country.”

Ridley is on the academic advisory council of Lord Nigel Lawson’s climate sceptic thinktank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and in his email to Bourne, he said: “I look forward to manning the barricades against windfarms once again on Tuesday”, an apparent reference to a debate in parliament during which Ridley spoke against wind power.

Ridley told the Guardian: “The company offers potential for emissions reduction (which I thought FoE favoured) as a byproduct of manufacturing something useful. I have no interest in it now or in the future, because my coal interests will expire long before anything happens. The distant possibility of interest I mentioned was on behalf of Northumbrian workers who might want to keep their jobs. I have not contradicted myself in any way.”

Ridley’s correspondence with Bourne included an email that the company had sent to Ridley, thanking him for a meeting at the House of Lords and for his “navigational advice”.

The company told Ridley that its technology “enables coal-based economies to now maintain their status quo” and that “while there are certainly environmental virtues of this technology set, the offering is about job saving, job creation and production of the world’s lowest cost base chemical in the most environmentally friendly manner”.

The company claimed their installations required “no government subsidy to be profitable”, a message Ridley passed on to Bourne: “They just need political – not financial help in setting up a demonstration project.” But he told Bourne: “It won’t use up all emissions, of course, because there is not enough demand for these chemicals.”

The company name is redacted but it tells Ridley that it: “received the largest grant of the six beneficial reuse carbon capture projects that the DOE [US Department of Energy] is supporting with funds made available through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act”, the same phrase used by US company Skyonics in an earlier press release. Skyonics’s technology turns CO2 emissions from power, cement and industrial plants into chemicals including baking soda and hydrochloric acid and has received a $25m US government grant.

Shrubshole said: “Coal CCS [carbon capture and storage] is a dead duck. Industrial CCS may have a future – but not if the carbon dioxide gas is simply used for ‘enhanced oil recovery’ and the extraction of yet more fossil fuels, as many companies propose.”

He said: “It’s time for the UK government to deliver on its promise of phasing out coal, end the scandal of opencast coal mining and leave coal in the ground.”

Banks Group, which operates the mines on Ridley’s land, recently won planning permission for a new opencast mine at Druridge Bay, elsewhere in Northumberland. The government has pledged to phase out coal power in the UK by 2025.

• Note added 2 August 2016: On 28 July 2016 Viscount Ridley forwarded to the Guardian readers’ editor a letter Ridley had received from the parliamentary commissioner for standards, Lucy Scott-Moncrieff. In it she advised Ridley that she had dismissed at the preliminary stage a complaint about Ridley from a Thomas O’Neill relating to the Code of Conduct. The commissioner’s letter said the complaint had been based on this article.

