They were used here quite a bit as windbreaks. In fact, my brother and I planted fifty of them in my dad's garden back in the 1960s as a 4H forestry project. He took them out about 20 years later. A row of them is darn near impenetrable because of the thorns. Birds will eat the olives and drop the seeds, then they come up like weeds.
Now they're considered invasive here on the river bottom. We have a few on our place but none of them are big enough to be worth fooling with for firewood. I think most of them died in the 2002 drought anyway.
And, yes, they have a nasty smell when burned.