Couldn’t this be addressed with virtual tape devices? The application gets presented with something that is indistinguishable in behaviour from a physical tape drive, but actually backed by a file on SSD or hard disk. Then you can copy that file to a real tape device separately
I can't say for oil and gas but I encountered the same thing in semiconductor manufacturing. CMP machines still use tape formats even if the file is now written to different media. The challenge during transition was in proving reliability and transition costs. Sometimes letting engineers deal with the hassle is cheaper than letting them fix it.
