The highlights. Let's see. There we go. Starting with the EBITDA, the adjusted EBITDA was NOK 13.4 million this quarter. We had revenues of NOK 67.6 million, which is the second highest that we've had in the quarter, and we had a third-quarter profit before tax of NOK 3.5 million before IPO expenses. The commercial uptime on all our business was 100% throughout the quarter. We're seeing that we're getting a good reception across the technologies that we have, both within the water treatment, but also within the handling of solids or cuttings like we have. We see that the market is growing, as a matter of fact, and Soiltech is taking market share, and we're very happy for that. We have been doing that for quite some time, and we intend to continue on that.
I would say that the really key driver for Soiltech, which is a waste management provider, is the ever-tightening of the environmental regulations in the market. I will see that this locally here or in the EU, but also more and more in other regions of the world, and this is something that fits very well with our strategy, which is to provide environmentally friendly solutions and preferring not using any chemicals, for example, in the treatment of water. It's very important to understand that this is an ever-increasing tightening of these regulations. The way we work in Soiltech is that we have confidence in ourselves, and we see that the market is growing, so in order to be in position to tender for jobs and to be able to deliver equipment in time to our clients, we are investing in advance of projects.
We have invested quite heavily the last years in new equipment. As of now, third quarter, we have about NOK 100 million on our balance sheet in equipment, which is readily available to be activated for upcoming projects. When you look at the return on capital employed on Soiltech, this has to be included in the consideration. There is an active tendering activity at the moment. There's a lot of things that go on. It's important to understand that Soiltech is not related to the ups and downs on day rates, on drilling rigs, or oil price as such, but we are more related to the requirement in our markets for sustainability. This is what driving us. The clients are looking for the solutions to implement and to get rid of solutions that are not compliant with sustainability.
So I'd say that's the main driver, although we work in the oil and gas market. We are all the time chasing new contracts, and we'll come back to our contract portfolio. But once again, in the quarter, we have been able to grow our active contract portfolio. This quarter, we had what we call call-offs under frame agreements with Equinor, Transocean. Typically, we have frame agreements with most of our clients, which regulates the main terms and conditions of the relationship. And under these contracts, the practice, for example, with Equinor, they make call-offs under the contract. The contract with these frame agreements typically has a long duration. Then, in addition to the call-offs with Equinor, this quarter, we also got a contract with PGNiG and with COSL Drilling, which complements our quite large portfolio.
Then we get a quite small contract, but very interesting contract with Pipetech for cleaning on refinery. This is something that can be a very interesting segment for Soiltech going forward. We're using the same technology as we are using to clean oily water. And when you have pipes at a refinery, there's scaling inside the pipes, and you need to clean this and flush the water, and then you need to be able to clean the water coming up. So we see that's the potential growing market for Soiltech. You can see on the right-hand side the development that we've had for the last quarters. On the revenues, you can see that we are around, I would say, stabilizing in the high 60s-70s at the moment. On the EBITDA side, it has been pretty flat.
I can say that one reason for this is that as we are investing in more equipment, we're also investing in personnel. In order to have personnel available for future projects, we need to hire them in advance of the project start-up. That means that in our operating cost, which is mainly personnel cost, there is personnel cost, which will be deployed, or personnel that will be deployed in upcoming projects. It is not so easy to match this from quarter to quarter. We have to look at the long-term trend. All right, we can go to the next. Discussing the operations, it's important to understand the client base that Soiltech has. We have been able to develop a very strong client base over the last years. We have long-term relationships with these clients. It's a combination of E&P companies and drilling companies.
Sometimes we sign up the contract with the E&P company, and sometimes it is the drilling contractor. We have to say that we are engaged with some of the world-leading players here. The discussion on who is going to do the waste treatment on the rig is a discussion between the E&P company and the rig company, but the final decision is with the license holder or the E&P company. We have very active relationships with these companies since we have quite a large base of contracts, and we have a large base of clients. We're able to monitor the various performance on the various contracts and to take advantage of best practices from all these operations and to continue to improve.
If we look at the clients, what they say to us and what they appreciate is the level of innovation that we have and the way that we are working to handle our clients' problems. For us, we take pride in very strong operations in Soiltech. This is kind of the heart of Soiltech. We have about 100 people working, which we call field engineers, working offshore or on the rig locations, and we try to make sure that all our employees are proactive and they assist on the rig and they are actively participating in the operations on the rig, even if it's outside of the direct scope of Soiltech. We can go to the next slide and have a look at the contract portfolio. This is Norway. You can see Norway is, at the moment, a market where there are long-term contracts.
I would say maybe reflecting that there's a tight market in Norway, and it's important for the oil company to make sure that the rigs are available, and we have a good mix of contracts in Norway. They're very long-term. Several contracts go to 2027, 2028, including options. The way it works is that our contract is very much tied to the rigs contract, so the way we have set up this is that we are reflecting the rig contracts for the mobile rigs, and this is our best estimate for the duration of the contracts. The contracts that we have directly with Equinor are all linked to their fixed installation, which is their producing assets, and we have an extremely good relationship with Equinor. They challenge us, and we are able to develop good solutions together with them.
Obviously, we like the long-term nature of these contracts, which are mostly producing assets that are producing assets that will continue for 10, 15, 20 years. We are motivated to do a very good job. We have a long-term frame agreement until 2034, including options with Equinor. If we do our job and they're happy, we will have a long-term cash flow coming from these contracts as a basis. Then we have many rigs for Noble, and we have many rigs for Odfjell and the other drilling contractors. If you go to the... Obviously, this is a fantastic base for us to continue to develop the various contracts with the clients to offer the full technology portfolio with them. This is the process that we're in. If you go here to the foreign contracts, they are different in nature. They are mostly shorter-term contracts.
That means that we have the same principle here. We follow the rig contracts. We have to be active in making sure that we are being extended when the rig contracts are extended. The rig market is quite tight, so the chance that the rig is getting a new contract after the current contract is pretty good. Having shorter contracts also gives us the opportunities to adjust the rates as the market develops. We've been in about 10 countries the last 24 months. We are able to make money also on single rig contracts the way that we operate. We have a system for that. I would say that going forward, we're looking at segments where we can have the economies of scale and have, we can say, a larger presence in a single market. So we are currently looking at that, and we have some initiatives going to expand the business in foreign markets. And this is something that we hopefully come back to in later meetings. Okay. So then let's have a look at the financial review. I'll leave that word to Tove.
So if we then look at the quarter, as Jan Erik said, this was the quarter with the second highest revenue. So this quarter, we had a revenue of NOK 67.6 million. We had a gross profit for the gross profit margin of 40%. We have been growing a little bit in SG&A compared to last year. And again, this goes with the same story that we are putting ourselves forward to be ready to grow. If we look at, we have a new item on the list, and that's related to expenses related to IPO.
Soiltech was listed on Euronext Expand now in September. In that relation, we also did a merger with Oceant eam. So this is a combination of merger cost and IPO cost, which is more like a one-time cost. Yes. So if we then look at the, if we exclude this IPO cost, the profit before tax for the quarter was NOK 3.5 million. Year- to- date, the revenues, we have NOK 193 million. This is a growth of approximately 13% compared to last year for the gross profit margin of 39% and Adjusted EBITDA of 37.4%. Again, the same total expenses related to IPO for the full year was NOK 17 million. And the profit before tax, excluding this item, is then NOK 13.3 million. Could also maybe add this adjustment line that we have in there that's related to option cost for this share option program that we have for onshore employees.
Next slide. If we look at the balance sheet, we see that the equity ratio is 47%. Again, as Jan Erik said, we have done quite a lot of investments in new equipment to be ready for further growth. As of now, in the balance sheet, there is approximately NOK 100 million of equipment in the PP&E assets that is ready to be deployed. Net interest bearing debt as of Q3 was NOK 149 million, an increase from year-end 2023 of NOK 111 million. And again, we have been investing, and so this is due to investments in new equipment for further growth. As of Q3, we have a pure cash position of NOK 33.9 million. In addition, we have an unused portion of bank credit facility as of 30th of September of NOK 39.6 million, giving available cash as of Q3 of NOK 73.5 million.
All right. Thanks. Thank you. All right. Let's move on to the final slide. Not the final slide, but the Outlook slide. I think it's important to understand that Soiltech is in a constant development phase, and what happened with Soiltech is that we were able to break into a market which was really dominated by larger players like SLB and Halliburton, which are quality companies, and we have, through our water treatment technology, which has been a market-leading technology, we have been able to, over the years, develop the relationship with these clients that we discussed and showcasing our abilities within a very sensitive area of environmental protection.
On the back of that, our strategy is to broaden our delivery with clients and to increase the scope and to include the whole full portfolio of our waste management equipment, which is whereof the main portion of that is the handling of the drilling cuttings on the rigs. And today, we have a few contracts within, like you can say, total delivery contracts. One is with, for example, on the Transocean Spitsbergen, which is working for Equinor, where we are providing the full portfolio of Soiltech. And this has been also a market where there has really been very, very few players. And on the back of good results within the water treatment, we have been able to successfully demonstrate the capabilities of Soiltech within cuttings handling.
We have invested in remote control technologies to monitor the operations, where we have seen that we are able to reduce the manning on both rigs. We have seen that we've been able to improve the safety. This is something that we would like to do more of in the future, and we are actively working on positioning ourselves into a segment where we deliver the full package. So if you then look on the general drivers in the market, it is the demand, the ever-increasing demand for cleaner production of the energy to make sure that the decarbonization of the oil and gas industry is continuing. And we would like to support that. And that's our main focus when we develop our technologies. Either it is in water treatment or other treatment, reducing the power consumption on the rig, reducing the diesel consumption.
If we can help there, that is something that will contribute to reduced emissions. So that's the background in the market. We see that the EU is tightening the discharge regulations, the environmental regulations, both to sea and air. But it's also happening worldwide. We see it in the Middle East, for example. It's really tightening. We see that in most markets in the world, the regulations are tending to be closer and closer to the Norwegian very tight regulations. This is good to us because we're coming in from the most challenging market. So for Soiltech, and then what does it mean in practice for us is that in the short- term, we anticipate higher activity in Q4 than in Q3. We expect also that this will continue through 2025 and into 2026.
We see that there is a lot of projects coming up, and we'd like to take part in that. So this is kind of summarizing our message on how we see the future. As we talked about, we have made proactive investments that we would like to put to work. So we can summarize. We go to the next slide before we take some questions. We had high activity in the quarter. We'd like to see higher activity. But based on the areas where we are, it's an okay quarter for us. We have the equipment available. It's ready. It's new. It's modern. It's very effective. And we'd like to take that out in the market. We have secured new contracts with our existing clients and also a new client, which is good. We hope to continue with that. We talked about the tightening of the regulations. This is very, very key when you analyze Soiltech, and we talked about that we anticipate a higher activity going forward, so that's really concluding our presentation, so now I'll hand the word back to our host.
Okay. Very good, so that concludes the presentation of the results, and we will now move over to the Q&A session. As a reminder, if you have any questions, post them through the Q&A chat function, and we will try to cover as many as possible. Yeah, so starting off, what are the three main risks with your operations?
Three main risks. Well, what I can say is that if you think about the actual operating the equipment in the field, we have very experienced personnel. This is first and foremost. We put a lot of emphasis into training our personnel and t o have active lessons learned, we have a lot of feedback from all of the operations that we have, which is good. We share that with our employees. We have professional days where we professionally exchange things where we share the knowledge, lessons learned. If you think about it on a rig, when you are doing the cuttings handling operations, you are on a critical line of rig operations. When you're drilling a well, the amount of cuttings is very large when you drill the upper sections when you come into the phase where you use oil-based mud. We call that the 17 .5 inch sections. That can be up to 100 tons per hour coming off cuttings that we need to handle on a rig.
You are on a critical phase, and you don't want to be in a position where you're kind of stopping the operations. So far, we've had very, very limited downtime historically for that. Maybe we're talking about one hour or something, which our equipment has not been available. It's very, very little for all the operations we have for the last three years. But you need to have qualified personnel for that, and we are hiring personnel that has the experience, and we do that ourselves. So generally, I would say that's it. If you took on a water treatment, it's, of course, very important. We treat the water on the location, take out the oil. So making the water so clean, it can be discharged into the sea. You want to make sure that you are not above the discharge limits.
That's measured in PPM, so 30 PPM at 30 parts per million. You can't go above that. Normally, in our average, it's far below. We have an average of around 7 PPM when we treat this. Actually, when we are on the rig, we are able to reduce the waste with about 90%-95%. I would say that is the second risk that we need to manage. Overall, you need to make sure that the equipment is up and running, that you do the maintenance of the equipment. We have daily, weekly maintenance equipment. We have very little downtime, as you saw. We have 100% utilization on our rigs.
If you look at operations in relation to the competition from others, I think what's important for Soiltech is to be in the forefront of technology development. We are fortunate that we are thinking waste management 24/7, and we are focusing on being on the forefront of developing the technologies, take the lessons learned back from operations, so we need to be always on the alert to stay ahead of competition on technology.
I think maybe I can add there also, Jan Erik, because as we have said, we have done a lot of investments, and we have very much new equipment, and also then compared to our competitors, we see that we have very brand new equipment, and so it should be state of the art, if we can say it that way.
All right. Very good, so moving on to the next question. Do you consider yourself an attractive acquisition target for majors like SLB and Halliburton?
A good question. Interesting question. I think the way I can answer that is that we think Soiltech has a large potential, and I think it would be not the smartest move for our shareholders to turn around and sell the company at today's level because we're just starting with developing shareholder values with Soiltech. I think maybe we have surprised our competitors, which did not expect that we would come where we are. We respect them a lot. We have learned a lot from them. It's a quality competitive market, but having said that, I think to be able to kind of move into the market like this with all these demands, there are high barriers to entry, so I think that going forward, I hope Soiltech will be an attractive company.
Okay. Yeah. Very good. The next question is, how do rig operators in foreign markets outside the North Sea treat waste from drilling operations?
Yes. That is interesting because we spent quite some time with drilling contractors in the Houston area and in Mexico, and we had our COO and also Vice President of Operations going over there this year and last year, so this is very interesting. Everybody is aware of the tightening requirements. What we have seen is maybe not everybody is aware of that there is available technology to handle the waste on the location and be able to discharge it within the existing parameters, so I think there is a lot of transporting of waste from the rig to shore for disposal and treatment on shore.
I think that there is a good business case for using our water treatment technology on the rig and reducing the waste there and discharging within the discharge parameter instead of having a very expensive transport of the waste to shore with the PSV and then onshore transporting by truck and then onshore handling at a centralized facility. There is, so I think there are this large potential internationally in the markets on mobile rigs in particular. They are not there yet as we see in the Norway market and in Europe, I would say.
Okay. Yeah. Very nice. The second to last question is, can you elaborate a bit on the merger with Oceant eam? What was the rationale behind that?
Yeah. The rationale behind the Oceante am was really twofold. We were in a process of preparing or aiming for listing on the Oslo Stock Exchange. They were already there, but the main reason for this was that they had cleaned up the balance sheet. There was no kind of guarantees for any legacy in Oceant eam, and they have very good, knowledgeable investors, and they had a cash position, so by combining with them, we got access to two things. We got access to the cash position that they had, and we also got access to the leading investors of Oceant eam, which is complementary to the shareholder base that we had in Soiltech, so we're extremely happy to having them on board in Soiltech, and they also have knowledgeable capacity with their board, so we also have one of their board members sitting into the Soiltech team. In total, I think this was a good deal for Soiltech.
All right. And then we also have came in a series of questions related to your future growth. Firstly, I think you can answer these questions combined. Firstly, how does your CapEx program look like in the coming years? And how and where do you expect to grow in future years?
When it comes to the CapEx program, we made a lot of investments. We are also doing more investments during Q4. And when that has ended, we have made all the required investments for 2025 and well into 2026 to be able to have a significant growth in Soiltech. So if there is a need for additional growth capital, that would have to be on the back of new projects that we don't see today that will come going forward. We are in a well-positioned position based on the investments that we already have done and the equipment that will be delivered during the next six months. And how are we going to grow? I think we see that there are growth opportunities in different ways.
If you look at the equipment side first and then take the geo markets in the equipment, we see that we are very well positioned within the water treatment technology. We also have available units there. We have about 33 units. You can see that 30 of these units will be the active fleet because we need to have some spares on shore as backup. And by the end of this quarter, we had about 24. By the end of this year, we'll have 24 units in operation. So there's potential upside deploying more units there.
But the main growth you'll see in Soiltech in terms of the top line and the bottom line will be within cuttings handling projects. Projects like I mentioned, we had on Spitsbergen. And we also have on Oseberg B and Oseberg Sør for Equinor. And we have on Noble Resilient, which is a jackup. And we'll see that we expect and we are targeting, I would say. We have an ambition to grow substantially within that segment. And so that is, I think, what you will see going forward with Soiltech. And if you talk about the geo markets, we still think there is very good potential in Europe, in Norway, and in other markets within EU and Europe. There is a good potential to increase the volume of equipment to existing clients.
This is, of course, what is the lowest cost growth strategy for Soiltech in terms of geo market. We're going to focus on Norway and Europe for sure. And then if you look outside of Norway, as I talked about in the beginning, we look at markets where we can see that we can have an entry and then be able to grow our position. I think you'll see a selective growth on Soiltech. We will still have an opportunistic view on single contracts when we get requests from Transocean and Noble, and they want us on international rigs. We have a system for those being profitable. We will still do that. We're looking forward to see the market where we can have a more significant position. We have different alternatives to that. And I hope that I can come back to that when things are starting to come to fruition.
Yeah. All right. Very nice. Can you please comment on the long-term potential of the contract received with Equinor at Statfjord B?
When we're talking about a potential is that we're underlining that it's a short-term contract in the beginning. You can say it's a testing contract. And in general, so I think what we're trying to say is that we'll see how that goes. We'll do a good job, and then we will evaluate after our client how the results are of that job.
All right. Yeah. I think we reached the end of the questions, actually. So yeah, thank you all for contributing with questions. And thank you for letting us host your quarterly presentation. With that, I'll hand the word back to you, Jan Erik, for some concluding remarks.
Yes. Thank you. We can just go to the final slide here and just a quick summary if somebody can turn the page. Anyway, it's not there you go. There we go. The most important here is that we have two important persons in the picture here. To the right-hand side, we have our VP of organization, people and organization. And to the left, we have our VP, which is responsible for HSEQ, security, and sustainability. They volunteered for this picture. Just a quick summary. We had high activity. I would be honest to say I really prefer to have it even higher, but it's okay. We have a lot of equipment available that we have invested. We'd like to put that into work.
We are continuing to get the contracts. With the industry leading clients that we have, we see the tightening of the regulations. We're following that closely. We try to develop our technologies to always meet those tightest requirements. We see and we have the ambition to grow the activity into this quarter. Definitely, we are very motivated to create a good growth for Soiltech during 2025 and into 2026. That concludes our presentation. Thank you to everyone.