The goal of this work was to introduce a novel thermodynamic approach for the oxidation of metals, which has been developed by considering the methods of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Our proposition allows the linking between some elementary mechanisms (e.g., diffusion, mechanics) for determining the evolution of the oxidation process of the system. To demonstrate the validity of our approach, we developed a numerical analysis for the oxidation of zirconium. Our results allowed us to determine both the oxidation kinetics and the influence of the epitaxial tensor during the process. The kinetics obtained showed the different behaviours observed experimentally at different time scales.