The ambitious project is being developed by Russia's state-controlled gas giant Gazprom and Germany's E.ON and BASF at an estimated cost of $12 billion.
Schroeder, who chairs the supervisory board of Nord Stream AG, the project's operator, said growing consumption of energy resources guarantees the use of all transit routes.
"Europe currently consumes 500 billion cubic meters of gas [per year] and will require another 200 billion by 2015. The Nord Stream pipeline will be able to ensure the transportation of 55 billion cubic meters," Schroeder said during a lecture on Russia and the future of European energy security at Columbia University in New York.
He said these figures suggest that the gas pipeline under the Baltic does not aim to compete with the existing transit routes via Ukraine or Baltic countries.
The first of Nord Stream's two parallel pipelines, approximately 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) long, each with a transport capacity of some 27.5 billion cubic meters per year, is to become operational in 2010. In the second phase, capacity should double to about 55 billion cubic meters per year.
