Olivine weathering is so energetically favorable from that paper that, if you put enough of it into a sphere, and feed it enough pure CO2, it's actually a usable thermal energy source.

You can "burn" it like coal, except that it "burns" CO2 instead of oxygen.

To relate back to Mars, you can probably do similarly absurd things with the perchlorates in the soil there. You can "burn" perchlorates in a reducing atmosphere of e.g. methane from the sabatier process, and end up with salt and an explosion.