Good day, and welcome to the Odfjell Drilling Ltd. Q3 2022 investor call. Today's call is being recorded. I would now like to hand the call over to Mr. James Crothers, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Odfjell Drilling Q3 investor presentation. My name is James Crothers, investor relations officer for the company, and I'm joined today by our Chief Executive Officer, Kjetil Gjersdal, and our Chief Financial Officer, Frode Skage Syslak. Today, I'll be going through our latest presentation, which you can find on our website. Before we begin, I'd like to highlight our disclaimer in the important information section of the presentation, which can be read at your leisure.
The agenda for today's call will include Kjetil going through our key highlights for the quarter and also providing a commercial update for the company. Frode will take you through the details of our financial results for the quarter before summarizing today's presentation and opening the call for a Q&A session. We'd highly encourage all participants to take part in that. I'll now hand over to Kjetil to take you through our highlights.
Hello, everybody, I'm very pleased to present what we see as a strong operational quarter, where we deliver an EBITDA of $81 million. Our fleet utilizations was 97.1%. Both the Stavanger, Atlantic, and Aberdeen operated at rate and load throughout the whole quarter, while Deepsea Nordkapp operated for Aker BP. I do want to mention that both the Stavanger and the Atlantic had some downtime due to some planned maintenance in the quarter. Our balance sheet is robust, and we continue the deleveraging with gross debt of $803 million and a cash position of $155 million.
Looking ahead, our order backlog of $2 billion, out of which $1.4 is firm, this provides us with a strong cash flow security in the years ahead. We shift to slide five. Talk a little bit about what we do on the technology side. In tandem with driving strong financial returns through operational excellence, we remain focused on reducing our carbon emissions and meeting our leading net zero emissions ambitions and strategies. Just as a reminder to all stakeholders, our ambition is to reduce our carbon emissions by 40% by 2026, 70% by 2035, and before eventually becoming a net zero emission company by 2050.
To achieve this, we will maintain increasing the already strong efficiency of our rigs, by trailing and implementing industry-leading technologies and alternative fuel sources. We have made significant progress on this so far, we expect further efficiency to be made in due course. I also want to highlight another big technology strategy for us, that is to further develop our digital solutions in our drilling systems. We now see that we are significantly improving in this area as well. We see that with the latest update that we've done together with our vendors, we are now really performing well. We are, for example, seeing automatic stripping with speeds as good as performed manually.
Also on this slide, you can see some statistics that I want to highlight, that we did a recent study recently based on the drilling database Rushmore, which shows that Odfjell Drilling was significantly ahead of their peers in regards to normalized well deliveries. I think this emphasizes our already strong efficiency from which we intend to improve. We will then move to slide six, which is our backlog slides. I think this time, instead of sort of commenting on old news, I will focus on what's new this time. I'll actually start with the Deepsea Yantai .
That is currently on contract with Neptune Energy, and we have managed to secure several short contracts for that rig in 2023 with the various number of operators such as Vår Energi, OMV, DNO, Neptune Energy, and Shell. We have been good in achieving back-to-back work with the smaller companies in Norway for both exploration and plug and abandon work. We have the Deepsea Bollsta. Pleased to announce that that rig will be arriving in Windhoek in Namibia, not tomorrow, but the day after. There will be a short mobilization period there, and we expect to be commenced that contract with Shell early December. This is a 12-month firm contract with a six-month option thereafter. On the Deepsea Mira, That rig is being marketed, and we remain optimistic with regards to getting that to work.
We hope to be able to announce a contract on Mira very soon. As it looks today, it is most likely that this will leave Norway as well for rig in international waters. The Hercules contract that was announced last week awarded by ExxonMobil in Canada. This contract is expected to commence in Q2 in 2023 as a firm duration of 135 days with an option of, another option of 60 days. That rig will soon arrive in Norway, where we will take over as manager, and the rig will undertake its five-year SPS before it's returning to Canada. I want to say that all in all, this provides us with a solid order backlog with further upsell potential.
We have, as mentioned, an order backlog $2 billion, where of $1.4 is tied to firm contracts, and this gives us a strong cash flow security going forward. We can move to slide five, where we take a look at the markets. We remain very optimistic when we see the market ahead. We see high energy prices, focus on energy security and majors with ample capacity to increase the spending. To meet the oil and gas demand growth that is forecasted, we all know that substantial new investments are required to compensate for decline of existing fields.
We have seen a significant reduction in the supply side and a notable increase in contracting and tender activity both in Norway, on the U.K side, and globally. All in all, we when we sum up this, we see a continuous strengthening of the global drilling market. Turning to slide number eight. As many of you know, offshore drilling rigs can operate in all areas globally, as we have a very flexible fleet, both harsh environment and with deepwater capabilities. I think our recent signings with majors like Shell and ExxonMobil shows that we are able to secure contracts with strong international oil and gas companies. We do see demand from all regions, both in harsh environments and deepwater markets. There are interesting opportunities both in U.K. and Norway internationally.
We are currently bidding on several tenders in all these markets. As you all know, when you combine the increased activity based on the tax relief package here in Norway, the uptick in the U.K. side and the strong deepwater market, where we know, particularly in Norway, we see a preference for our fleet, the Tier-One rigs, we remain very positive on the market outlook ahead, especially from 2024 and onwards. All right, that concludes my slide. I will then hand over the word to my CFO, Frode.
Thank you for that, Kjetil. We are now on slide nine on the income statement. As Kjetil said, the EBITDA in the quarter was strong, $81 million. For the own fleet segment, there was an increase on performance bonus and fuel incentives compared to the previous quarter. We see increased add-on sales and profits from add-on sales from integrated services in the quarter. We have some reversals of operating costs, amongst other reversal of COVID-19 related provisions. For the external fleet segment, there was an increase in EBITDA due to more activity for the managed rigs. Want you also to notice that there is a leasing effect of $6 million in our Q3 figures, resulting from long-term leasing agreements related to real estate, wire and drill pipe, and mooring equipment. You will see that's reflected in higher depreciation and financial items.
We have a negative effect due to large portion of our liquidity being held in NOK, which has depreciated against the U.S. dollar during the quarter. You see that reflected in the net financial items. Moving to page 10 and the balance sheet. We see continuing deleveraging of the balance sheet with net interest-bearing debt of $648 million as of end of Q3, leverage ratio of 2.4. The company has a robust balance sheet with an equity ratio of 57% based on total assets of $2.2 billion and a sound cash position of $165 million as of end of Q3. Moving to page 11 and the cash flow. We see strong cash flow from operations.
On the CapEx side, year to date, we have an outlay of $32 million, where $17 million has come in Q3. This includes CapEx related to periodic maintenance and green initiatives, including hybrid installations. Part of this green CapEx will be covered by the NOx Fund with an expected refund of around $13 million due early in 2023. Also in Q3, we have made early commitments for long lead items related to our forthcoming FPS projects in order to mitigate supply chain constraints and be well prepared for the forthcoming project. We have repaid debt in the form of scheduled installments in the quarter. Lastly, it's worth noting that our year-to-date cash flow of -$18 million reflects the $50 million that was distributed together with the distribution of Odfjell Technology back in March.
Adjusted for this, Odfjell Drilling's year-to-date cash flow is positive $32 million. Slide 12. As you will be aware, we have maintained our focus on increasing the strength of our balance sheet. As can be seen, our credit metrics remain strong. We have further deleveraged our balance sheet and are now positioning the company to pay a sustained dividend in the future. Before we open for the Q&A session, let us briefly summarize the quarter on page 13. It's been a positive quarter for Odfjell Drilling generally. We have a good operational performance, delivered strong EBITDA. In the quarter, we added significant amount of backlog in Norway with a five-year contract with Aker BP. We were also awarded a contract for Bollsta in Namibia, reducing the available supply in harsh environment markets. Hercules was also recently awarded the contract in Canada.
We have long visibility. We see further upside potential beyond 2024. We see increasing tendering contracting activity both in harsh and deepwater markets. This provides a strong backlog for our flexible fleet. We are currently involved in tenders and direct negotiations both in the North Sea and internationally. This concludes our presentation. We can open for the Q&A session.
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Okay, thank you everyone for joining the call. If you have any other further questions after this, please do get in touch. We highly encourage any questions and look forward to speaking to you in the near future and certainly on the next conference call as well. Thanks again.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's conference call. We thank you all for your participation, and you may now disconnect.