Henry Deans
Analyst · Stifel
Thanks, David. Good morning to everybody on the call. I hope you are well and keeping safe. At the beginning of September, in line with the prevailing government advice, we reopened our company offices on a phased team A, team B basis with staggered working hours to both reduce risk and to maintain social distancing. This turned out to be a temporary measure. However, as the second wave of COVID-19 started to take hold in late September, and we subsequently had to close our offices again, once more we're running our business remotely from numerous home offices worldwide. We expect this will remain the case well into Q1 2021, if not beyond. By now, we are all very familiar with the technology, thus ensuring a seamless transition and maintaining business as usual with no impact on our operations, our customers or our employees.
This week, the prospect of the Pfizer vaccine provided a glimmer of hope for all of us and was a welcome shot in the arm for the global economy. We all live in hope that this vaccine or one of the others that are currently on the development, fast-track, will prove to have good efficacy and will be quickly rolled out globally, much to the relief of everyone.
U.S. LPG production and exports have been remarkably resilient throughout this pandemic, and there's no sign of that abating. In fact, the recent modest uptick in U.S. rig counts helps further underpin confidence in LPG supply. That was needed.
Heading into the winter season, U.S. LPG stocks are at 5-year highs. This coupled with former oil prices and improving naphtha LPG spread and robust demand in China should ensure export tons are priced to move. It was very pleasing to note that despite the impact of the weather headwinds and petrochemical supply from hurricanes Laura, Zeta, Eta, that the business continued to be profitable in Q3, albeit at lower levels. We have built on the momentum of Q2 with a net income of $1.5 million and an adjusted EBITDA of $31.9 million in Q3.
Our ethylene terminal joint venture was profitable for the quarter, helping to more than offset the impact from the shipping business of the weather disruptions in the U.S. Gulf. The quarterly and year-end to date operating revenue, net income and EBITDA have all improved substantially when compared to 2019.
Utilization, on the other hand, has proved to be a bit of a roller coaster this year. After starting the year in the high 90% levels, rates dipped to the mid-80% levels in February, March and April, when the pandemic struck, before rallying to the low 90% levels in May and June. Unfortunately, that recovery in utilization rates was short lived as hurricane Laura knocked out over 25% of the U.S. global olefins capacity for an extended period of time, causing rates to fall back to just under 80% for Q3.
Although October was also impacted, thankfully, utilization rates have since started to recover and are currently hovering in the mid- to high 80% levels. The record 2020 hurricane season was, in many respects, a perfect storm, leaving in its wake, reduced olefin supplies, causing domestic prices to spike and leading to a narrowing of the ethylene arbitrage to Asia. Thankfully, [indiscernible] have since recovered as units ramped up and product was again priced to move.
Turning now to crew release, I am pleased to report that we've been able to dramatically reduce the overdue crew changes by completing a significant number of crew release. Currently, we have less than 50 sea sailors who have overdue leave, and we continue to work hard to reduce the backlog whenever and wherever possible. We are working pragmatically with the flag states and classification societies as we resolve the many practical inspection and dry dock challenges that have been caused by this pandemic.
Our Morgan's Point joint venture ethylene terminal continues to exceed our expectations and has had an impressive quarter, both in terms of profitability and throughput. We have now exported just over 300,000 tons in the terminal. The terminal complex is working extremely well, and we're impressed by the workmanship, the quality and the performance of the installation. As you can see from the photographs in the supplemental information pack, construction of the ethylene tank is progressing safely, on budget and on time, with commissioning and start-up scheduled for December this year. We expect the first ethylene tons to be loaded into the tank in mid-December, which will be a key milestone and a crucial step in our journey to our nameplate capacity of 1 million tons. [indiscernible], and we fully expect that our terminal will exceed nameplate capacity with these in the future.
Over Q3 now, and this team have been very busy, progressing our refinancing initiatives. The long and short of it is that the company now has a much improved balance sheet and has significantly boosted our liquidity to around $120 million, with a clear loan expiry runway until March 2022 and with no maturities over the next 17 months. Now in these prepared remarks, we'll provide much more color on our recent refinancing success.
Q3 has been a mixed quarter for our business with considerably mostly weather-related headwinds, which have impacted our overall utilization rates, some of which lingered well into October. This has been more than offset by our terminal, ethylene JV tailwinds, which, although including some one-off gains, has ensured that Q3 continued in the same vein as Q2 and remained profitable.
Our ethylene terminal diversification strategy is now demonstrably starting to pay dividends as the stable cash flows from this infrastructure investment with its take-or-pay contracts start to hit our bottom line. When the terminal is fully [ commissioned ] and the volumes are ramped up, this stable cash stream will grow further and help offset volatility in our shipping business.
Thankfully, we've now come out of the hurricane season and utilization rates have started to improve. As the handysize, new-built vessel orderbook is at historical lows and with the imminent ramp-up of several new North American export facilities in late 2020 and the first half of 2021, including our Morgan's Point ethylene JV, the Repauno terminal [indiscernible] throughput facility, we believe these factors will help fund vessel utilization rates. This, coupled with an improving ethylene arbitrage and increasing demand for ethane and LPG in China, will help boost exports. And should, all things being equal, be good news for the handysize segment and for Navigator Gas.
We are in pole position to capitalize on these opportunities with our terminal joint venture, our Luna Pool, our existing fleet and our strong balance sheet.
With these few remarks, I'd like to hand you over to our CFO, Niall Nolan. Niall?